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THE GOSPEL 


AND 


MODERN SUBSTITUTES 


THE GOSPEL. 


AND 


MODERN SUBSTITUTES 


BY 


Rev. A. SCOTT MATHESON 


DUMBARTON 


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THE object of the following pages is to bring out 
the inexhaustible fulness of the Gospel of Christ 
in relation to Modern Creeds, that contest its 
supremacy and claim to supersede it. Christianity 
is at once the most exclusive and the most com- 
prehensive system of thought and belief. In an 
age of intellectual unrest like the present, the 
Christian attitude is apt to be boldly aggressive 
or timidly defensive, and the fault in both cases is 
a fault of narrowness. To the writer there seems 
to be a more excellent way of dealing with modern 
problems—the way of comprehension. All anti- 
christian solutions of these problems have some 
elements of truth and lfe which the Christian 
Church has failed to apprehend, which, under some 
of its organised forms, it has tended to neglect or 
deny. Much of the organised Christianity of to- 
day, with its rule of thumb, its conventional dead- 
ness, and its worship of success, is less worthy 
than many of the movements which it regards as 
being opposed to religion. It has inveighed 


5 


6 PREFACE. 


against the leaders of such movements, without 
answering them. Men like Comte, Darwin, and 
Schopenhauer have been martyrs to the narrow 
dogmatisms and shallow optimisms of their day ; 
like the Founder of Christianity, they have been 
the “despised and rejected” of Society and Re- 
ligion. With what results? Their systems of 
thought have become the Creeds and Gospels of 
our time. How are they to be met? How shall 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in face of these modern 
substitutes, prove itself to be the “everlasting 
Gospel” ? It seems to the present writer, that the 
best method of treating modern systems is not to 
take up strong negative ground on the one hand, 
or strong aggressive ground on the other, but to 
show how Christianity contains the best of all 
systems. He claims for Christ the best of every- 
thing in Science, Positivism, and Socialism, because 
he believes the fulness of Christ and His Gospel 
to be infinite. The object aimed at is not a 
polemic or an apologetic, but an eirenicon. In 
dealing with such systems, the design is expository 
and sympathetic, rather than critical and depre- 
ciatory, so that the Son of God incarnate, sacrificed 
for us and risen again, may be reverenced as all 
and in all. If we take a sufficiently wide view, we 
need no other answer to doubt than what Christ 
gave to the messengers of John the Baptist, and 
history so well affirms. “Art Thou He that should 


come?” men are asking; “or shall we find in 


PREFACE. 7 


Comte, or the teachers of science, or the leaders of 
social reform, or the students of art, some better 
guide to truth and freedom, beauty and worship ?” 

The new influence which has been in the world 
since Christ came to it, may be casting its old 
leaves only to show us that it is still the tree of 
life, whose leaves are, with every new spring, for 
the healing of the nations. In some respects the 
present may not be the worst time for the Gospel 
of Christ and the Church of God. Our old Gospel 
needs to be approached in new fresh ways, because 
it is of perennial interest to the minds of men, and 
rival systems are serviceable in eliciting its per- 
petual novelty and freshness. Our old questions 
of theology and worship, of polity and service, are 
finding new expression in the terms of science and 
art, of equity and righteousness, of brotherhood 
and love. Any attempt, however inadequate, to 
show this may be helpful, when conventional belief 
is shaken on every hand, to make way for enlight- 
ened faith ; and with the earnest prayer that this 
popular, and no doubt most imperfect attempt, 
may yet be of some service in this direction, the 
writer sends forth his volume as a contribution in 
the service of Him who is “worthy to receive 
power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and 
honour, and glory, and blessing.” 


CONTENTS. 


I. Tor GospEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES, . ; : 
II. Tuer GospEL AND AGNOSTICISM, : : ; : 
III. THe GosPpEL AND SCIENCE, : : : ‘ 3 
1V. THE GospEL AND ScIENCE—THE LAW oF HEREDITY, 
V. THE GOSPEL AND ScIENCE—THE LAW OF VARIATION, 
VI. THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM, . : 

VII. THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALISM, . : : ‘ ‘ 


VIII. THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM—SOCIAL GRIEVANCES, . 


IX. THE GosPEL AND SocrIALISM— THE DISTRIBUTION OF 


WEALTH, 75 Oren ; ; 5 : : ‘ 
X. THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM, . : : : ‘ 


XI. THE GOSPEL AND ART, . : : ; : : 


114 
133 
167 
193 


221 
258 
287 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 


THE pressure of the problems of life seems to lie 
with a heavier weight on men’s minds at the 
present than almost at any other time in the 
history of thought. There was such a time when 
Christianity first claimed the suffrages of mankind ; 
never has there been such a crisis since till these 
last days. And men seem to be almost as weary 
of the Christian gospel as they were of the pagan- 
ism which it superseded. They are willing to 
abandon the. Christian name with philosophic 
serenity, with a sense of relief, or even with 
passionate delight. They hail the dawn of a day 
when the religion of supernaturalism, with its 
incredible dogmas, and its wearisome prospects 
of hereafter, shall become a thing of the past. 
“The era, so called, of grace is near an end,” they 
say, ‘and the era of science is being ushered in, 
not with the song of mystic angels, but with the 


10 -2HE GOSPEL. AND MODERN SUBSTISCOLES 


hearty welcomes of rational men.” And who is to 
be the divinity of the new era? For all of them 
still acknowledge that man must have a religion of 
some kind. What name or names are to succeed 
those of Christ? Not a few claimants to the 
vacant throne present themselves, and come to us 
with large pretensions and promises of great things. 
It is a misfortune to be put so often on the defen- 
sive, that thought is diverted from building up 
truth into a struggle with rival systems. To 
vindicate the Christian revelation against assault 
on every side, to secure its foundations against 
false theories of science or philosophy, and to show 
its immense superiority to rival systems, is a duty 
which we cannot decline, though too much may be 
made of it. The temptation also is strong to come 
to terms with the speculative thought of an age, 
even though the price be sacrifice or adulteration 
of characteristic Christian ideas. Christianity has 
always betrayed a near kinship with the best 
results of human reason ; but it has never yet been 
found practicable to pour her new wine of truth 
into the bottles of any philosophical system without 
weakening or wasting it. Its vital force as a 
factor in human history is so great that some 
substitute, genuine and worthy enough to replace 


G7 GOUSTre LAND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. “11 


it, must be forthcoming ere we can give it up. 
Nay, it offers an interpretation of religion, life, and 
destiny so adequate that with Paul it is competent 
for every Christian to say, “I have that whereof I 
may glory, through Jesus Christ, in those things 
which pertain to God.” God might have given an 
answer to the many problems of life in words, but 
instead of this He has done so ina Person. He 
has given much to man to know of Himself, and of 
His will, and the treasures of wisdom hid in Christ 
are the rarest and most precious. The more these 
are opened out, the more will it be seen how well 
adapted they are to the deepest needs of our’ 
nature, and how infinitely superior they are to any 
of the various isms that claim to be a new creed 
and a better religion in our day. 

I. We may glory wm the Christian revelation of 
the existence of God. 

In contrast with those things which pertain to 
God, as Jesus Christ reveals them, we may note 
the last utterances of science, and learn how much 
reason we have for glorying in our Christian 
gospel. 

Professor Huxley once suggested that he should 
like to revive the worship in which some unknown 
Athenian had anticipated him when he erected an 


12 ZFHE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 


altar “to the unknown God;” and this is the origin 
of the word “Agnostic” or “ Agnosticism.” It 
describes a system of thought which claims to be a 
creed, and it is called the Religion of the Unknow- 
able by Herbert Spencer. Huxley and Spencer 
repudiate the name of atheist, and believe that it 
is only the fool who would say, either in his heart 
or with his lips, “There is no God.” The latter 
tells us that we are “ever in presence of an in- 
finite and eternal energy from which all things 
proceed.” Agnosticism does not profess to demon- 
strate that a Creator does not exist, but that we 
have no grounds for supposing that He does. 
Whether there be a God or no, it declares bluntly 
that He has never informed us of the fact. His 
existence is said to be incapable of verification. 
He is formless, nameless, unknown, and unknow- 
able. There is an ultimate reality, cause of all 
things, but whether to say “It” or “ He,” they 
know not, but on the whole they prefer the first. 
Yet they offer this inscrutable mystery to our 
worship! The religion of the unknowable is only 
the ghost of religion, and can never rise to a 
worship, or affect conduct; it must remain barren 
till the unknowable take shape, and be worshipped 
through its manifestations. The empty void shall 


THE GOSPEL AND-MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 13 


never have our prayer, for only that which lifts us 
up and proves more than any unconscious world 
can we worship. We long 


“for a God whose face 
Is humanised to lineaments of love; 
Not one who, when my hand would clasp his robe, 
Slips as a flash of light from world to world, 
And fades from form to form, then vanishes 
Back to the formless sense within my soul, 
Which evermore pursues and loses him.” 


Whom the great lights of science cannot by search- 
ing find out, and therefore ignorantly worship, 
Jesus Christ declares unto us, when He represents 
Him as our Father in heaven. We are unspeak- 
ably indebted to Christ for that revelation of the 
divine nature. The very idea of God as our 
Father comes from revelation. We can appeal to 
the faiths of the world, and say that the Father- 
hood of God was unknown till Christ revealed it. 
And not only is He the highest revelation of the 
Divine, but He Himself is the highest Divine we 
can ever know. It pleased God to reveal Himself 
in Jesus Christ, not merely in a republication of 
old fragments of truth, but in a disclosure, full and 
simple, of Himself. Christ manifests Deity at once 
human and divine, full of majesty and meekness, 
of strength and love. Thus He affects and wins 


14 THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 


us, not only teaching us to say, “Our Father,” but 
drawing our homage to Himself when He says, 
“Believe in God, believe also in Me: for He that 
hath seen Me hath seen the Father also.” 

II. We may glory wm the Christian revelation of 
the worth of man. 

Revelation, culminating in the person of Christ, 
is the true answer, and in a sense the only answer 
to agnosticism, and for the same reason it answers 
another rival system, that of Positivism, or the 
Religion of Humanity. In Scripture we see how 
the invisible God has been seeking for and finding 
the way to the heart of man throughout all the 
story of the ages. As we read the story of the 
call of patriarch after patriarch, of priest after 
priest, and prophet after prophet, the training of 
the people of Israel and their steady guidance 
through all sorts of fortunes, till the story finishes 
with the coming of the perfect Son to seek and 
save the lost, are we not face to face with the real 
manifestation of a God of righteousness who com- 
prehends us, however little we comprehend His 
deeper counsels, who shows us that He has the 
key to our lives and destinies, though we have not 
the key to any of His thoughts except what He 
has been pleased to reveal in Christ? What a 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 15 


revelation have we of God’s precious thoughts to 
usward! How great is the sum of them! 
Positivism does not present a conception of 
human worth at all comparable to this. Like the 
former creed, it recognises nothing as known 
beyond the sphere of the present life, its facts and 
experiences. It denies the divine side of man and 
a divine order in the universe; it repudiates a 
higher sphere of existence, and makes humanity its 
highest word, its supreme being. Humanity, as 
an organic whole, becomes the object of religious 
reverence and affection. No other object of wor- 
ship remains for Comte except this. Man is 
nature's choicest result and crown, and if he is to 
worship at all, he must worship the ideal of 
humanity in its most perfect forms. Such a con- 
ception is only a mutilated form of Christianity, in 
which it ought, therefore, simply to make us glory 
all the more. Instead of the Father in heaven, 
humanity is the great parent who has made us 
what we are; and instead of one perfect Christ, 
Lord and Saviour, we have many imperfect christs 
and saviours of the race. One tries hard to 
conceive how humanity can ever be the object 
of worship or provocative of religious affections. 
While Christ does not present such an object for 


16 THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 


supreme regard, yet His revelation of man is 
grander than what you find anywhere else. He 
lays bare the unspeakable possibilities of the human 
spirit as the offspring of the eternal Father, 
dowered with capacities for finest moral issues, the 
object of infinite love, and the heir of immortality. 
No one but God who made man knows what 1s 
locked up in him, and Christ who knows what 
is in man never loses sight of his supreme 
worth, and seeks his freedom, salvation, and per- 
fection as the one great aim of all His redeeming 
energies. 

IIL We may glory in the Christian revelation 
of sin and suffering. 

The problem of evil has strained the finest minds, 
and crushed the tenderest hearts, since the birth of 
thought. - All of us have felt the sadder moods of 
humanity, the deep despairs that haunt our best 
hopes, the veil of sadness which clings to the 
skirts of our brightest joys. Out of such experi- 
ences men have elaborated a system of thought, a 
creed, and named it Pessimism. It is the religion 
of Buddha, and three hundred millions of Asiatics 
accept its fatal doctrines. Three of its well-known 
teachers are the Italian poet Leopardi, Arthur 
Schopenhauer, and the German philosopher Hart- 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 17 


mann, all men of morbidly sensitive and sombre 
temperament. A new form of this Buddhist creed 
is spreading everywhere in Europe, in England, 
and even in Scotland. Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem, 
“The Light of Asia,” has depicted in fascinating 
verse to English readers the life and character 
and teaching of that divine pessimist, Gautama, 
the founder of Buddhism. The essence of. this 
system makes evil objective, and not an accident 
in the world ; makes it the groundwork of life, not 
merely a shadow cast by life’s brightness, but the 
substance out of which it is wrought. Buddha 
found the root of all misery in desire, and Schopen- 
hauer in the will to live, and both taught that 
desire and ceaseless striving after the unattained 
should be crushed to death, and then freedom and 
rest would come. 


“Blessed Nirvana—sinless, stirless rest— 
That change which never changes,” 


Now, Christ was neither pessimist nor optimist, 
but stood between the two extremes, He did 
not teach that existence is an evil, that all effort 
is pain, and will to live is suffering, and that the 
only way to bliss is to renounce the will to live, 
and to reduce conscious being to a minimum by 


the extirpation of desire. Nor did He deny the 
B 


18 THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES: 


ee ee ee ar eae 


existence of sin and suffering in the world, or seek 
to get rid of them by starving desire or annihi- 
lating will. He searched down to the very core of 
the disease, and showed its dark fearfulness ; He 
saw evils of every kind around Him, and painted 
them in sombre hues. Yet His attitude toward 
them was never one of depression and despair, but 
always one of cheerfulness and hope. To penitents 
and sufferers He was wont to say, “Be of good 
cheer ;” and He gave them promise of forgiveness 
and help, and assured them that sin and suffering, 
evil that ought not to be, might be vanquished, 
and would without fail eventually pass away. 

Now, it is here Christianity wins, and holds the 
field, and gives us occasion to glory through Christ 
in those things which pertain to God. The key 
to all our problems lies in the Christian conception 
of man as a sinner and a sufferer, and of what he 
requires for deliverance from his evil state. It 
omits nothing in man’s need from centre to clr- 
cumference ; it plumbs the aching void just in 
order to fill it with the riches of grace; it exposes 
sin in its deep baseness and fearful issues, and 
meets the disorder of sin completely by its message 
of redeeming love. “Be of good cheer,” Christ 
says to all who are burdened with manifold woes. 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 19 


“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest. I have 
taken away the sin of the world as the Lamb of 
God. Look unto Me, and be saved: and the 
burden shall be lifted off your weary shoulders ; 
the darkness shall vanish, and the day of joy 
dawn.” There may be a trace of Schopenhauer in 
us all at times, but still more should there be of 
the power of Christ. Whatever mars and enfeebles 
the powers of our nature, the vital forces of His 
redemption can destroy; whatever confines and 
hinders its immense reserves of unexhausted enerey, 
the mighty operations of His Spirit can evoke and 
set free. Desire finds scopefulness in affections set 
on things above; and the will to live, no longer an 
aching craze, finds in efforts to remove the miseries 
of the world the simplest, purest, and most blissful 
consciousness of life, 

Let us bring our problems of sin and suffering 
to the Saviour, let the light of His cross fall upon 
them, and all will be pardon and hope, joy and 
peace. Let us open our eyes frankly to all in 
these problems from which one feels disposed to 
shrink; let us not evade it, but depict it in the 
darkest colours, and persuade ourselves that it is 
not good, but evil. Then let us see the light of 
redemption shed upon it, and whatever be the 


20 THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 


sickness of heart, to the eye of Christian hopeful- 
ness, it is certain of final and complete recovery. 

IV. We may glory in the Christian revelation 
of the uses of life. 

As there is nothing in the gospel of Christ to 
depress, but everything to exalt the consciousness 
of life, so it contains an inexhaustible potency for 
enabling us to grapple with the social problems of 
life. Socialism is another of the modern creeds 
that try to supplant Christianity, and many look to 
it as a panacea for our ills. Its contention against 
Christians is, that they have been selfish, and 
reduced religion to a private consolation and a 
personal advantage, and have been “so busy saving 
souls as to have no time for saving men or women,” 
and helping to improve their social condition. We 
need to distinguish between the Christian religion 
and the religion of Christ—between a conventional 
Christianity and the Christianity of Christ. Social- 
ism has a keen perception of the existing inequalities 
of man’s lot. Misery everywhere compels its 
attention. The shameful disproportion in the 
means of living between the highest and the lowest 
conditions of men, the depraving and destructive 
fierceness of competition, the whole width and 
depth of the life of man, with its bewildering 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 21 


confusions and helpless misery, give to social 
questions at present increasing urgency, which is 
ageravated by serious misgiving as to the avail- 
ableness of methods and energies for redemption 
from all those ills. Socialism exhibits the peculiar 
temper of the age, and the particular direction of 
current energies. Never before has there been 
so wide and keen a sense of the unity of life, of 
social dependence, of the obligation to determine 
our mutual relations by duties rather than by rights. 
Never has the call to labour, love, and sacrifice been 
so loud and general. And never has the failure of 
material remedies for distress made the fact of social 
problems being spiritual at heart, so obvious, nor 
the want of an active spiritual dynamic so urgent. 

It is in heart-forces and working forces that 
socialism fails to cure the wrongs of the time, and 
bind class to class in a common aim for the good 
of the commonwealth. But who is sufficient for 
these things? No wonder if those who stand 
without, in sad or bitter alienation from us, say, 
‘Show us your works.” Can we accept the chal- 
lenge in a worthy spirit? We may glory in being 
able to show, in a way that men can see, what the 
social gospel is, and how the gospel of the kingdom 
of God can, in its breadth and simplicity, interpret 


22. SHE GOSPELVANDUVODERNGS USSSA UT fo. 


every want, and sustain every effort of men. 
There is but One who can heal our social distresses, 
even He who was welcomed with the song, ‘ Glory 
to God in the highest, on earth peace, and good- 
will to men,” who now sits throned in the heavens, 
and patiently works with the angels to fulfil that 
song. Social redemption is in Him. Power, 
method, impulse, dwell there in Godlike fulness. 
After the experience of centuries, it still abides true 
that ‘in none other is there salvation.” Read His 
spirit, acts, words, and achievements, at the first, 
to know what He still is and does. His ministry 
exhibits a breadth and depth of social sympathy, 
and a fulness of healing energies for life’s manifold 
ills, quite unique. He went about doing good, 
lifting burdens off the weak, soothing the sad, 
and reconstructing shattered lives. Misery drew ~ 
to Him as flowers to the sun. Wherever you see 
Him, you can tell the poor and needy are not far 
off. Where shall we go for motive power but to 
Him who has so commended His love to us? At 
His cross we see the sources of the fine passion 
that constrains us to live not unto ourselves, but 
seek to serve our fellowmen in labours of love. 
Therefore we are not ashamed of the gospel of 
Christ, for it is the power of God unto social 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 23 


salvation. In all the social crises of life as well as 
for individual good, we preach Christ and Him 
crucified, as the chief working force in human 
redemption, the creative energy of that love which 
saves at once the soul and the world. 

We must come to Christ, and gain the prize of 
learning love. The perfection of man is a love of 
use—life used in the service of man. The highest 
we can be is reached when we do our utmost for 
those in sorest need. ‘“‘ He that would be greatest 
among you, let him be your servant.” Let us hold 
all we are and have as stewards of God, for the 
service of man. All hands to the work, then, is 
the urgent cry. For we share God's gifts on con- 
dition of fullest use for others, and we help in the 
best life of the ages just as we fulfil that condition. 

V. We may glory in the Christian revelation of 
death and hereafter. 

What does materialism tell us about death and 
that which lies beyond? It teaches that matter 
‘and force are everything, and that there is no 
unseen universe—no world beyond this world of 
appearances. Mind, soul, spirit, or whatever else 
you may call it, is only a manifestation of matter. 
Death, at last, clutches the fluttering life, and 
extinguishes it for ever. Death is the be-all and 


24. JHE GOSPEL‘ AND MODERN SUBSTITULIES. 


the end-all. We go to materialism, and ask for 
lieht, but behold darkness,—for life, but behold 
death, and naught beyond the grave. It tells us 
that life is no better than a spark blown from an 
anvil, kindling for a moment, and then vanishing 
away. Just as the individual emerged out of life- 
less matter yesterday, so will it sink into lifeless 
matter to-morrow. 

Is that a creed to glory in? Is it a worthy 
conception of life? Does it truly interpret and 
answer the solemn beatings of our hearts? I trow 
not. There are primal instincts that belie and 
contradict it: there are intuitions and presenti- 
ments that put us face to face with hereafter. 
They point with persistent finger to the solemn 
future, and tell us that the consequences of our 
actions follow us most certainly across the grave. 
All other creatures go down happily and uncon- 
sciously to their fate. Man alone feels the last act 
to be tragedy: alone he must die, pass into the 
Great Presence, and then know what comes after. 
“Tt is appointed unto man once to die, and after 
death the judgment.” Christ gives a far grander 
and truer idea of human destination. That view 
of His which gives the highest view of the soul of 
man, and the largest view of the universe, is surely 


THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. ;25 


the worthiest, and will prove itself the conquering 
power. He has “abolished death, and brought life 
and immortality to hight.” The true universe is 
mind, spirit, that which in God originated, and still 
in man interprets, all things. The view that takes 
in spirit as well as matter is greater by many 
infinities than materialism, for it gives an infinite 
in every soul, and thus becomes the measure of its 
future existence. ‘‘ How much,” Christ says, “is a 
man better thanasheep?” And again, ‘‘ What isa 
man profited if he gain the whole world, and lose his 
own soul?” The materialistic theory as to human 
destiny cannot assure us that there is no human 
being so insignificant as not to be of infinite worth 
in the eyes of Him who created the heavens, or so 
feeble that his action may not have immeasurable 
consequences long after this material system shall 
have crumbled into nothingness. 

It is no rival to Christianity, nor worthy of a 
single boast. Therefore, let us glory in Christ’s 
great revelation of immortality, and take the con- 
solation it offers to the sad, of forgiveness to the 
sinful, of hope to the bereaved, and of rest to the 
weary. Let the evidence of its fitness to meet the 
emergencies of experience gather till it crown the 
strugele of earth with the victory of heaven. Let 


26 THE GOSPEL AND MODERN SUBSTITUTES. 


us cultivate the inspiration of this hope on our way 
to the city of God, and do so till we reflect, on 
the verge of the grave, the unclouded brightness of 
heaven. Let us keep in view the moral purpose 
of life, till one supreme determination helps each 
one of us to say, “To me to live is Christ, and to 


die is gain.” 


1 
THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


THE saying of Comte is often quoted by his 
disciples as a profound epigram, that “the atheist. 
is the most irrational of all theologians.” We do 
not see anything particularly profound or epigram- 
matic in the remark; for whatever truth there be 
in it has been much more tersely expressed by an 
old Psalmist, ‘‘The fool hath said in his heart, 
There is no God.” Atheism is felt by all men who 
think to be wanting in reason, and we are thankful 
to find so great a philosopher as Comte saying so ; 
but the Psalmist goes deeper than he in tracing 
atheism to its true source—an evil heart of 
unbelief. Whenever reason awakes to serious 
reflection on the subject, most men cannot persuade 
themselves to believe that the reason they have 
and the universe which it is set to study can be 
the product of chance, dead matter, or blind force. 


The belief of the atheist seems to all men but 
27 


28 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


himself to demand more credulity than any belief 
of myth or legend that has been palmed on man- 
kind. It is not atheism with which our gospel is 
face to face in the present day, but another 
negative which may, indeed, take a man perilously 
near the edge of atheism, or lead him deep into the 
shrine of reverence and true worship. It is not 
atheism but agnosticism which claims to hold in 
the future the place which Christianity has held 
in the past. The real question is not, as under 
atheism, “‘Is there a God?” That does not state 
the question fairly, and suggests a doubt not less 
painful to the heart than insulting to reason. The 
real question, as under agnosticism, is this, “‘ Can 
we know God?” The scientific spirit of our age, 
in a large, and, it may be said, growing measure, 
gives to that question a negative reply. We may 
trace the natural history of the agnostic position 
in the life of Charles Darwin. From being at one 
time orthodox in religion he passed through theism 
to agnosticism. When he wrote the Origin of 
Species, he taught the belief in a Creator. He 
admits “the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, 
of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, 
including man with his capacity of looking far 
backwards and far into futurity, as the result of 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 29 


blind chance or necessity.” ‘ While thus reflect- 
ing,” he says, “I feel compelled to look to a First 
Cause having an intelligent mind.” Gradually, 
however, this conviction became weakened, and at 
last he wrote, “The mystery of the beginning of 
all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must 
be content to remain an agnostic.” He turned 
away from the contemplation of those great 
questions connected with the why and whither of 
existence, and religion had no more place in his 
life. His mental attitude was somewhat stoical. 
There is the “Don’t know” agnostic, and the 
“Don’t know and don’t care” agnostic besides, 
and Darwin’s position partook somewhat of both. 
In taking it up, he did not show any feeling 
of sorrowful despair. Without any philosophical 
basis for his position he drifted into pure indiffer- 
entism, and religion fared with him as did the 
higher ssthetic tastes. About the age of thirty 
he lost all pleasure in art, music, and poetry. 
Shakespeare was “so intolerably dull that it 
nauseated” him. ‘‘ My mind,” he says, “seems to 
have become a kind of machine for grinding 
general laws out of large collections of facts; 
but why this should have caused the atrophy 
of that -part of the brain alone on which the 


30 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM, 


higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.” The 
organ of religion seems likewise to have perished 
by atrophy ; it was not cultivated, it gave him no 
concern. 

His distinguished pupil, Professor Huxley, says : 
‘“‘ Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether 
ancient or modern. It simply means that a man 
shall not say he knows or believes that which he 
has no scientific grounds for professing to know or 
believe. . . . Agnosticism says that we know 
nothing of what may be beyond phenomena.” 
And Herbert Spencer says: ‘The power which the 
universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.” 
Such are the utterances of foremost leaders of 
science in our day. Much of their popular fame 
is due to the bearing which their opinions have 
upon those subjects which transcend the natural 
and belong to the unseen. There is no originality 
in their speculations, for they are as old as 
Lucretius and Epicurus. It is the opinion of 
many that all currents of thought tend to the 
conclusion that the origin of all things is beyond 
our reach; that an infinite reality exists in the 
world of phenomena, but cannot be understood 
by us; that there may be a God, but we cannot 
know Him. If students of science tell us that the 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 31 


idea of a Creator fades away before a patient, 
disinterested study of the universe, let us remem- 
ber that their loss of faith does not destroy the 
truth which they give up. “The truths which 
Christian convictions inadequately approach remain 
as the ground and basis of all life, whether they 
are recognised or not.” This age deals in negatives, 
and its greatest negation is the Religion of the 
Unknowable; but even in so negative an age, 
it does not need a vigorous intellect to perceive 
that men of science are only playing with “the 
ghost of religion.” Belief in the unknowable is 
too vague to become a religion, to give rise to 
a worship, to afford a basis for conduct. The 
agnostic position can never be ultimate and final. 
It is impossible to find a middle way in this great 
controversy, or to preserve a dignified attitude of 
mental suspense. Real intellectual earnestness 
must always regard such a negative position as 
unstable and weak, and it will either push men 
into the folly of atheism or give new force to 
the belief in a Creator, which, as Darwin even 
acknowledges, “‘is natural to all.” 

Meanwhile the attitude of unbelief towards all 
that les beyond the sphere of the present life is 


one of professed ignorance. Whatever aims to 


32 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


define for us the unseen world is represented as 
pure conjecture, wholly incapable of verification, 
and is therefore to be rejected or ignored. Words 
of ridicule are poured on a religion that holds by 
the old ideas of a personal God, and the soul as 
distinct from the body. Opposition takes many 
forms; some leave religion aside altogether, while 
others become aggressive and propagandist, turning 
their negation into a new religion, and offering it 
as a substitute for Christianity. We read in the 
Agnostic Annual for 1890, the seventh year of pub- 
lication, an article on the Comfort of Agnosticism, 
and the sum of the comfort is found in a denial of 
the eternal hell, and in leaving the undiscovered 
future to take care of itself. 

Now, the problem whether we can know God 
is the one great question which towers above all 
others, and the one on an answer to which depend 
some of the gravest issues. The proof of His being 
and knowableness is undoubtedly somewhat diffi- 
cult to state. It is easy to deny, and scepticism 
is safe so long as it does that. To fight with 
denial is like fighting with the air. It is not so 
easy to affirm, and give proof. He who denies 
may find many a defect in the proof offered, and 
fortify himself in his unbelief by such a discovery. 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 33 


We deal with a vital and practical, rather than 
with a logical and metaphysical question, and for 
an answer to it we must rely on the primitive 
intuitions and experiences of the human _ soul 
itself. What has been the witness of these to 
man’s most permanent self in every age, and in 
what way has it been given? It has been clear 
and forcible, and often overwhelming and irresist- 
ible, in streams of the heart, rather than of the 
intellect—in direct senses of God and immediate 
manifestations of Himself to the soul. The being 
of God, without any demonstration of intellect, 
spontaneously arises as a truth in the human spirit 
in its best moods. The greatest thinkers of our 
race,—Plato, Kant, Berkeley, Descartes, Fichté, 
Pascal, and others,—who have agreed in recognising 
the personal self-consciousness of man, also agree 
that three realities may be affirmed as primitive, 
fundamental, and necessary conditions of thought. 
The reality of things outside of us is as certain as 
the reality of our own existence; and in this 
consciousness of self is involved not only the con- 
sciousness of a world outside of us, but equally the 
consciousness of an absolute Being. Poets of the 
first order, like Wordsworth, recognise these high 


instincts as primal convictions of the human spirit. 
C 


34 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


Browning sums up his faith in these three things: 
‘‘T trust in nature; I trust in‘the soul; I trust in 
God. Or, in other words, we have a sense-conscious- 
ness, a self-consciousness, and a God-consciousness.” 
Such are the innate convictions of men’s souls, 
which may be increased in force and clearness by 
following on to know them, or may be overcast 
by neglecting or opposing them. So intuitive and 
axiomatic 1s the sense of God that every reverent 
mind will say at once, ‘I know what God is, if 
you do not ask me;” though when asked, the 
demonstration may not be so easily produced. 
There is great force in what Mansel urges: “Those 
who lay exclusive stress on the proof of the exist- 
ence of God from the marks of design in the world, 
or from the necessity of supposing a first cause for 
all phenomena, overlook the fact that man learns 
to pray before he learns to reason; that he feels 
within him the consciousness of a Supreme Being 
and the instinct of worship, before he can argue 
from effects to causes, or estimate the traces of 
wisdom and benevolence scattered throughout 
creation.” By the whole make and constitution of 
his nature, man has been framed for religion, and 
so the immediate knowledge of God is as real as 


the immediate knowledge of his own existence. 


tHE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 35 


Kven rationalism asserts the primal revelation of 
God within the soul, and the @ priori or ontological 
proofs of His being and character derive their chief 
value from this intuition. It is only as a spark of 
divinity glows as the life of our life, that we can 
rationally believe in an intelligent creator and 
moral governor of the universe. Many are satisfied 
with this God-consciousness alone, neither caring 
to prove it nor relying much on any proofs that 
have been long drawn out; and of them it may be 
said, “‘ Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet 
have believed.” 

But it is an obvious difficulty against the whole 
principle of intuition, that one man will deny that 
he has any such perception of a truth alleged by 
another to be intuitive, and the empirical school of 
thought in our day takes up this negative attitude. 
Such a difficulty may be met on two lines. First, 
what do the human faculties testify? Certain 
intuitions are universally confessed, such as those 
of memory, personal identity, and causation, and 
they imply the existence of a supreme power with 
corresponding attributes. Nothing shows the 
unreality and impotence of the opposite view so 
well as the fact that, after exorcising the divine 
personality behind nature, it is compelled, by the 


36 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM, 


logic of its own method, to exorcise also the human, 
and reduce it to an automaton. Next, what is the 
evidence of facts? That faith in God is a real 
power in the world, by which the lives and 
characters of multitudes of men and women have 
been, and are being continually moulded, and that 
such men and women have been, and are, the salt 
of the earth and the heht of the world. 
Arguments, however, not a few, can be adduced 
to answer the latest form of unbelief with regard 
to the being and character of God. It admits that 
there is an absolute force, a principle of life, an 
infinite and eternal energy, from which all things 
proceed ; but it denies that we have any knowledge 
of this force in its essence, or any right to clothe 
it with attributes of personality and intelligence. 
There exists, as it allows, a great reality of which 
all phenomena, as presented in consciousness, are 
the knowable manifestations; but that reality is 
shrouded in impenetrable mystery, and must be 
regarded as the unknown and unknowable. ‘To 
say that we can have any real or immediate know- 
ledge here, is to proceed on the maxim of the 
sophist Protagoras, that “man is the measure of 
all things.” Hitherto mind has found the arche- 
type of itself and explanation of the universe in 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 37 


an intelligent and moral Author, of absolute power, 
wisdom, and goodness ; but the agnostic holds this 
to be a pure creation of the mind, a deity of our 
own making, and contends against it on the ground 
that there is a great gulf fixed between the absolute 
reality of things and our consciousness of them. 
On this view, it is vain for man to inquire into the 
ultimate basis of existence as a worthy object of 
trust and affection, or attempt to find a support 
for his life in the faiths and hopes of religion. The 
question is plainly as to the reality of human 
knowledge. Is consciousness a trustworthy re- 
porter? Is the reality of things for ever beyond 
the reach of our finite minds? Are we confined to 
the knowledge of phenomena, and unable to rise to 
the knowledge of things in themselves? A school 
of thinking has given prominence to these questions, 
and they have issued in conclusions which earlier 
teachers were not able to forecast. Sir William 
Hamilton’s Philosophy of Nescience, and Mansel’s 
Limits of Religious Thought, have unwittingly 
contributed to the establishment of the present 
agnostic position. They were meant to shut man 
up to faith, but they have been wrested by the men 
of science to fortify the latest form of unbelief— 
that of agnosticism. Recognising the limits of our 


38 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


intelligence, it admits something beyond those 
limits —something that, while we know it to be, we 
cannot know what it is. It is thinkable, but not 
knowable. The finite, it is urged, cannot know the 
infinite, and it is absurd for the finite mind to 
transfer its own laws to the nature and action of 
the infinite. We can conceive nothing higher than 
mind, but mind may not be the highest thing in the 
order of existence. There may be gradations in- 
definitely of being above mind, as mind is above 
matter. Now, this argument, advanced by agnos- 
ticism, is a two-edged weapon, and proves suicidal. 
For if the agnostic gets behind this doctrine of 
relative knowledge, and from thence assails our idea 
of God, his own view of things cannot escape the 
universal destruction. ‘l'o speak of the unknowable 
as force, is to be far advanced in the human form 
of representing the unknowable; and if it is auda- 
cious for the Christian to regard the infinite power 
under the terms of mind, it is equally audacious to 
do so under the terms of matter. And if it be said 
that the former view drags the ultimate reality 
down to our level, the latter drags it down beneath 
our level. What can be more becoming than to 
conceive of it by what is highest in the order of 
existence? It cannot be less though including 


Tue GOSEEL: ANT) AGNOSTICISM. 39 


infinitely more, which may be unknown and un- 
knowable ; but as the infinite power is manifested 
tous through phenomena, we are compelled, by the 
structure of our being, to interpret those pheno- 
mena as manifestations of mind. And the immense 
wealth of mind is the one fact above all observable 
in man and the universe. 

The only question is, how much more human the 
representation is than it needs to be. Man must 
conceive of God through some medium, and there 
are only two media through which man can think 
of Him—the medium of nature, and the medium 
of man’s own spirit. The necessity of reading the 
unseen through its manifestations is recognised by 
Herbert Spencer, when he says: “Very likely there 
will ever remain a need to give shape to that 
indefinite sense of an ultimate existence, which 
forms the basis of our intelligence. We shall 
always be under the necessity of contemplating 
it as some mode of being, that is, of representing 
it to ourselves in some form of thought, however 
vague.” His representation of the reality behind 
all phenomena, while as arbitrary and human as 
that which he rejects, is at the same time so vague 
and dreary as to be like a boundless sandy desert, 
almost without contents for thought, with none for 


40 THE *GOSLEL AND AGNOSTIC SM, 


the heart, and therefore incapable of inspiring any 
true religious affection or awe. Worship of the 
unknowable can never be a substitute for that 
gospel which supplanted it eighteen hundred years 
ago, when Paul said to the men of Athens, 
‘“ Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him 
declare I unto you.” Why must we own an 
inscrutable power, and nothing else, working 
darkly forward through all forms of being, and 
why must the last word of philosophy and religion 
be the ‘‘ Unknowable”? It is the savage in his 
native woods, lstening to the thunder, who 
trembles before a mighty power which he does 
not understand, but it is the Hebrew prophet or 
Grecian sage who clothes the mystery of power 
with personality, intelligence, and life. Such a 
view may be depreciated as anthropomorphic, but 
it illuminates nature not less than it crowns man. 
It is strange that the other view should be thought 
more dignified, when this one implies the truth 
that the mind of man has been made in the image 
of Him who created all things. It is evident, then, 
that Godis knowable. We may know not only that 
He is, but also what He is. His means of making 
Himself known to His intelligent creatures must 
be as boundless as His presence and power. Of 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 41 


course, all human knowledge is partial ; never- 
theless, in regard to God, it may be more real, 
more precise, or more necessary for the conduct of 
life than that which we have of each other’s minds. 

The personality of God is keenly assailed by 
agnostics on the ground that it implies limitation, 
and cannot therefore be ascribed to absolute and 
infinite being; but there is no cogency in the 
objection when the essential elements of personality 
are considered. These are self-consciousness and 
self-determination, and they may belong to one 
who is absolute and infinite, no less than to one 
who is relative and finite. It is by consciousness 
and will that man breaks through the narrow 
limits of relative existence, expands into the 
infinite, and gains an apprehension of it. But 
divine personality must not be treated as, in all 
respects, identical with human personality, else we 
may fall into serious error. True it is that “the 
citadel of theism is in the consciousness of our own 
personality : within ourselves God reveals Himself 
more directly than through any other channel.” ! 
And for this reason unbelief tries to invalidate 
man’s personality, the existence of which is a fact, 
beyond all others, most certain. But though God 

" The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief; G. P. Fisher, D.D. 


42 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


cannot be regarded as less than personal, and His 
personality includes the essential elements of our 
own, yet it must be of a higher and more intense 
kind, and it is absolute in a way that transcends 
man’s comprehension. 

God is knowable, therefore, and many lines of 
proof help us to enlarge our knowledge of His 
existence and character. A few of these may now 
be pointed out. 

The principle of Causality compels us to the 
recognition of an Omnipotent Being. 

We are so constituted as to ask the why of 
things, to seek after causes, and rise to a first 
cause. It is true that Hume and his followers 
have tried to empty this principle of its element 
of efficiency ; but in spite of all speculation, the 
mind recognises causation as distinct from mere 
precedence in order of time, and holds to it as an 
intuition. From childhood we are on the outlook 
for causes. Hence the numberless “whys” of the 
young as the mind opens to the mystery and 
marvel of the surrounding world. Why does a 
stone fall to the ground? Why does a kite fly? 
What makes the sun rise in the east and set in the 
west ? What makes the beautiful rainbow? Such 
questions spring up in obedience to the law of the 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 43 


mind, that every event must have a cause. In all 
its higher developments the mind never throws 
off this law. To its working we owe the wonderful 
progress of modern science. The aim of philosophy 
is a search into the causes of things, in which it 
shows an inability to pause till it has reached some 
absolute first cause. Every phenomenon calls for 
an explanation ; every event demands a cause. 
The two ideas of succession and causation are 
quite distinct, and it is the latter which the mind 
asks for as an explanation of all things. Now, the 
universe had a beginning. Science tends more and 
more to this conclusion, showing through many stages 
that what was once thought to be substantial and 
permanent has provedto be contingent and temporal. 
But may there not be a permanent element in the 
material universe, as Stuart Mill argues; and why 
may not this material universe be the necessarily 
self-existent Being? Our consciousness of causal 
power refuses to see in matter alone the beginning 
—the cause and essence of all things. Matter is 
so manipulated, and so embraced within the law of 
cause and effect, that we are compelled to recognise 
a prior and higher cause. The doctrine of regress 
carries the mind back to such an origin. All 
chains of causes must lead up to single absolute 


44 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


cause. The argument that in these chains each 
part is caused by that which precedes it, and that 
in tracing an eternal series it would be absurd to 
ask for a first cause, is neither profound nor cogent ; 
for if each link of the chain of possible causes hangs 
on another, it is plain that the whole could hang 
only if there was a hook for it.*| And no hook will 
do but an all-originating will. Let us put the test 
to ourselves. We are, and know that once we 
were not. There was once a time when neither we 
nor any living creature existed, or could exist on 
our globe. How came we to be? We know our- 
selves to be an effect of some power, and the power 
cannot be less than man, but immeasurably greater. 
Is the first cause of the materialist—be it matter or 
motion—conceivably adequate to produce such an 
effect? It cannot account for the fact of conscious 
personal existence. Our inner consciousness tells 
us that we are other than, and more than the 
material organism to which our life is, for the time, 
inexplicably bound. And so when we endeavour 
to account for the whole physical universe, with its 
properties and forces, the existence of that universe 
involves the pre-existence of thought and will. It 
is the witness of consciousness that all chains of 


1 Hutchison Stirling. 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 45 


causes lead up to mind as the true cause, and 
therefore lead up to a personal God as the 
First Cause. We cannot waive the inquiry; 
the why of the whole universe is an exercise 
of thought which we cannot evade, and mind 
in man is compelled to rise to a Mind able to 
conceive the whole, whose thought is as much 
higher than ours as the heavens are higher than 
the earth. . 


“ Nature is but a name for an effect whose cause is God.” 


Lhe argument of Design compels us to the recog- 
mition of an Intelligent Author of the Universe. 

In the order and adaptation of means to ends 
displayed throughout nature, the proof for God’s 
existence is one which impresses philosopher and 
peasant alike. The conviction of design rises up 
spontaneously in the mind from an observation of 
the fair and orderly universe. Of course, attempts 
have been made to break the force of this argu- 
ment. From Democritus down to the last agnostic, 
there have been men who sought to explain it 
away, and its validity has been keenly contested 
in modern times. Hume has tried to overthrow 
it. He contrasts the omnipotence of God on one 
side, and the impotence of man on the other, and 


46 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


asks if there can be any analogy between them. 
He argues that it is the grossest partiality to make 
ourselves the models of the universe. But the 
answer to such an objection is obvious. In argu- 
ing from design, we simply use the reason which 
is our power and our very selves, and in the 
exercise of which we have all history and science 
to confirm our trust. Hume's sceptical objections 
did not, however, amount to much when he wrote, 
in the Natural History of Religion, such words 
as these: “The whole frame of nature depicts an 
intelligent author, one single being, who bestowed 
existence and order on this vast machine, and 
adjusted all its parts according to one regular plan 
or connected system.” ‘No one,” he said, as he 
walked home one fine evening with a friend, “can 
look up to that sky, without feeling that it must 
have been put in order by an intelligent being.” 
J. S. Mill advises those who would establish the 
argument for God to stick to proofs of design ; he 
could not set aside the marvellous structure of the 
eye. It has been by following the lamp of final 
causes, and obeying her beckoning hand, that the 
masters of anatomy, from Galen to Owen, have 
been guided in their brilliant discoveries; it has 
carried conviction, from the time of Socrates to 


tHE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 47 


that of Faraday, to the foremost minds of the 
human race, and found almost its sole antagonists 
among spinners of speculative cobwebs. The 
prints of divine forethought, and the convictions 
they produce, have been ploughed into the very 
subsoil of the human mind. It has been the 
fashion for men of science to call this argument 
old-fashioned, to pooh-pooh it, and try to sneer it 
out of court; but they cannot succeed. It always 
comes back, often enriched with the spoil which 
they afford. So manifold are the adjustments and 
harmonies of the visible creation, so often do the 
beautiful adaptations of nature strike the greatest 
observers, that such words as “ scope,” “ purpose,” 
and “cosmical order,” are as frequently used by 
adversaries as by advocates of the design argument. 
Darwin uses such language perpetually, and to an 
extent far exceeding any.other natural philosopher, 
and for the simple reason that he cannot help it. 
His works in this way become as valuable as 
Paley’s Evidences, for the illustrations they give 
of design and benignant contrivance in nature. 
Here is the climax of proof in confirmation of the 
great argument of natural theology. It is the all- 
pervading idea of the universe. One may as well 
try to expel the atmosphere, as try to expel this 


48 THE GOSRELD AND AGNOSTICTSAL 


idea. We cannot get rid of it: like Him of whom 
it testifies, it is everywhere. 

We are not insensible to the objection raised 
against the design argument, that it represents the 
genesis of the heavens and the earth, as effected 
after the fashion of a workman shaping a piece of 
furniture, and that it regards the First Cause as 
a mechanist, elaborating his contrivances after a 
human model, and withdrawing to see how they 
go. Such a view of God, while attributing skill 
to Him, would be very inadequate, and indeed 
unworthy. The modern school continually write 
as if design and plan in nature were of the same 
tentative and irregular character as the operations 
of human genius. It is the mere human mechanist 
they think of, and of God as being reduced to that 
conception alone. But no sensible theist does so. 
When he uses the idea of design, he means only 
that the works of God and the works of man are 
products of intelligence, showing mind and order, 
and not blind chance. ‘There is no call upon us to 
defend the imperfect analogies, by which some 
advocates of this argument may have pictured to 
themselves the works of nature. We cannot con- 
ceive too grandly of nature, and the harmony and 
continuity of its movements. The very magnifi- 


tHE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM, 49 


cence of its order is only a further illustration of 
divine wisdom. 

Objectors to the design argument urge that 
defects may be found alike in the organic and the 
inorganic world, and so they infer that our world 
cannot be the work of a divine intelligence. Like 
King Alfonso of Castille, had they been present in 
the counsels of the Almighty when things were 
made, they could have suggested a better and 
more orderly arrangement of things. And, with- 
out doubt, there are facts in nature somewhat 
difficult to explain. A class of facts seems to show 
an imperfection in the adaptation of a given plant 
or animal, to the circumstances in which it is 
placed. Helmholtz says that the eye is not a 
perfect optical instrument, but has all the defects 
of such an instrument, and even some which are 
peculiar to itself. Then think of the terrible facts 
of nature: the beasts and birds of prey, with their 
awfully beautiful contrivances to inflict pain and 
death; the selfish eagerness with which each 
creature struggles for its own existence, though to 
the destruction of others: the odious instincts 
which exist in some animals, such as the young 
cuckoo, to oust its foster-brothers, or the ants to 


make slaves. Animated nature is ‘“‘red in tooth 
D 


50 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


and claw.” We stand aghast, and raise questions 
like that of Blake in his little poem to the tiger: 
‘Did He who made the lamb make thee?” I 
doubt if such facts can be quite accounted for, 
and another chapter would be needed to deal with 
the problem, but the difficulty can be lessened by 
several considerations. Darwin thinks that im- 
perfect adaptations are due to the transition 
through which the organism is passing, and that 
the instincts referred to are not ‘specially 
endowed or created instincts, but small conse- 
quences of one general law, leading to the advance- 
ment of all organic being.” The same imperfections 
occur in the moral order of things, and good men 
are wont to explain them by a reference to general 
laws. If some facts of nature are terrible, still 
they are proofs of intelligent, though not so plainly 
of benevolent desion. And at worst they are but 
a few exceptions, in a vast system of co-ordinations 
and adjustments for the production of the most 
beneficent ends. Whether the universe be viewed 
as a whole or in detail, it is full of the grandest 
order and most exquisite contrivance, teeming with 
utility and beauty and symmetry everywhere. 

Nor does the doctrine of evolution interfere with 
the teleological argument. Should it be more 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 51 


widely established than it is, it would not render 
the idea of a divine mind originating nature, and 
working in it, less tenable. There is no antagonism 
between them. Nay, it is an inspiring conception 
to look upon nature, in all its departments, as 
intimately linked, from primordial germ to the 
most fully developed organism—from its rudest 
speck to its subtlest symmetry of form, or most 
delicate beauty of colour. The idea of growth and 
vital affinity is a higher idea than that of mere 
technic, after the manner of men. Religion has 
no concern with any mere physical theories of the 
origin of things. Nothing within the province of 
nature, no change in the view of its operations, 
affects the primal thought. Mind is there, as the 
light of all our seeing, whether nature works by 
evolution or by special fiat. Science is free to 
interpret its plans, but the existence of plans under 
any conception is the witness to our minds of 
another mind behind and over all. 

The faculty of Conscience compels us to the 
recogmtion of a Supreme Moral Being. 

The argument from conscience is called the 
moral argument, and it carries us to a solemn and 
impressive point in our discovery of the being and 
attributes of God. It not only proves that God is, 


52 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


but what He is—supreme and perfect Goodness. 
It is the consciousness of moral law, bears witness 
to moral law as the rule of duty, and lodges in 
every man a sense of responsibility to do what it 
requires. Conscience is the faculty which acts as 
the discerner of right and wrong in our nature, 
and as the judge of our conduct, accusing or excus- 
ing, uttering praise or blame with an imperative 
voice, and thus pointing straight to a supreme and 
perfect will, as the foundation of all authority and 
obligation. We put our finger on the distinctive 
character of right and wrong, when we single out 
that word “obligation,” to express most clearly 
men’s belief that the origin of right comes from 
some higher world than our own. Conscience is 
‘the vicegerent in the heart,” as Dr. Chalmers 
used to argue, from whose testimony we can infer 
“ the righteousness of the Sovereign who placed it 
there.” 

So cogent and irresistible is this argument, that 
attempts have been made to evade it by finding 
the derivation of conscience from below, in the 
growth of selfish preferences and family instincts. 
Hardly anything could be more inadequate and 
unsatisfactory, than Darwin’s account of the 
parentage of conscience. He traces it to the bond 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 33 


of the herd, and the award of the multitude; he 
derives it from the instinct of society, the instinct 
which causes the flock to confide in the courage of 
its leader, and causes the leader’s delight in the 
submission of the flock. From such rude instincts 
the consciousness of right and wrong, the senti- 
ment of praise and blame, has been derived by the 
agnostic school of thought. Could anything be 
more derogatory to conscience, the apex and crown 
of our nature? It is an explanation which, in its 
anxiety to avoid the conviction of divine authority, 
rejects the most stubborn testimony of conscience 
itself. It does not account for the sense of obliga- 
tion which confronts and defies it in every way. 
The word “ ought” expresses a species of necessity, 
which nature does not, and cannot present to the 
mind of man. We know also that the deeds which 
win the moral homage of the world, are those 
which have been dared by men who acted in direct 
defiance of social and conventional standards, and 
in obedience to some higher standard which lays 
its yoke upon them, and carries with it the cate- 
gorical imperative of duty, weighing upon them as 
the truth of the planetary system weighed upon 
the mind of Galileo. Nor does such a view explain 
the feelings of remorse and penitence that are 


54 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


among the deepest experiences of our moral nature. 
“Tf.” says Dr. Newman, “we feel responsibility, 
are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the 
voice of conscience, this implies that there is One 
to whom we are responsible, before whom we are 
ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. 
Conscience excites all these painful emotions, 
confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation ; and on 
the other hand, it sheds upon us a deep peace, a 
sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which 
there is no sensible earthly object to elicit. .. . 
If the cause of these emotions does not belong to 
this visible world, the object to which man’s per- 
ception is directed must be supernatural and 
divine; and thus the phenomena of conscience, as 
a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with 
the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge holy, 
just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive.” 

Some teachers would, for belief in a Divine 
Ruler, substitute a kind of moral idealism, such as 
moved the soul of the poet Shelley; but such 
creations of the brain, woven of poetry and philo- 
sophy, could never take the place of real religion. 
No such idealism can fasten its hold on our nature, 
claim positive authority over conscience, or exert 
any greater influence than belongs to a reigning 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. i 


fashion in manners or a school of taste in art. As 
a power to command, it cannot sway like the deep- 
rooted belief of men that their life is guided by the 
will of a righteous intelligence, which may beresisted, 
but to resist which is to kick against the pricks. 
The phenomena of moral life cannot be explained 
by any agnostic system of thought. It must point 
to some real stable foundation for human affections, 
for the existence of human law, for the obligation 
of righteousness. Allow even that conscience may 
be derivative, and that the growth of moral senti- 
ments can be traced, still behind that growth the 
question remains, What is the foundation of moral 
obligation? Suppose that the eye grew in the 
‘same way, and that we could trace every step in 
the physiological development of the eye, all this 
would not explain the origin of light. As the eye 
does not make light, so the growth of moral 
sentiments does not make moral truth. The eye 
does not create the sun. Conscience does not 
create ‘‘the Sun of righteousness,” but has been 
made to recognise it. Righteousness is not a by- 
product of consciousness ; it 1s either at the heart 
of things, or it has no real existence whatever. 
Can we give up the sanctities of home, the sanctions 
of law which cement the state, the obligations of 


56 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


personal duty, as things which have no foundation 
in reality, for a system that bids us look on man 
as an automaton or discuised machine? Professed 
agnosticism in religion cannot stop there—it will 
go on to professed agnosticism in morals. “ You 
say that thoughts of a personal, righteous God are 
illusions, and that it is immoral to believe them. 
On your showing, the principles of morality are 
proved to be delusions, and therefore it is immoral 
to believe them.” We are coming to that. The 
question propounded lately, “Is marriage a failure?” 
points that way. As well ask, “Is man a failure 2?” 
and touch the bottom of this absurdity. No, the 
voice of conscience rises clear above the strife of 
tongues, and it forbids us to think ourselves the 
sport of illusion, and it compels us to believe in a 
sovereign Judge of right and wrong, in the spiritual 
consequences of our actions, and in the rewards of 
merit and demerit in some real life, here or here- 
after. There is no reality in human life at all, if 
the witness of conscience is not real. And for all 
the ages, its witness has beenthe same. ‘“‘ Behold, 
the fear of the Lord, that 1s wisdom ; and to depart 
from evil, is understanding.” 

Let us learn from this subject,— 

1. A lesson of humility. We are finite, but 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. Le 


God is infinite—what, then, can we know of His 
absolute nature, His unlimited personality, His 
all-powerful, all-wise, and all-righteous attributes ¢ 
We are all agnostics in a true sense; religion 
would be shallow without its agnosticisms. Job 
cries, ‘‘ Who can by searching find out God?” One 
- of the Psalms says, ‘“ His greatness is unsearchable.” 
Isaiah represents Him as saying, “ For my thoughts 
are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my 
ways. For as the heavens are higher than the 
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and 
my thoughts than your thoughts.” Paul speaks 
of God as “dwelling in hght which no man can 
approach unto.” Cyprian writes, “ We cannot see 
Him—He is too bright for our vision ; we cannot 
scan Him—He is too great for our intelligence ; 
and therefore we but think of Him worthily when 
we own Him to be beyond our thought.” Hooker, 
in his Heclesiastical Polity, observes, ‘‘ Dangerous 
it were for the feeble brains of man to wade far 
into the doings of the Most High; whom although 
to know be life, and joy to make mention of His 
name, yet our soundest knowledge is to know that 
we know Him, not indeed as He is, neither can 
know Him.” He maintains His transcendence by 


veiling the mysteries of His being and the judg- 


58 THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 


ments of His providence, that He may call forth 
in us a humbler trust, a deeper awe, a meeker 
resignation, and a holier obedience. 

2. A lesson of toleration. In trying to com- 
prehend the power behind the veil, so vast and 
awful, no wonder if men think and feel that 
nothing worthy thereof can be expressed in mortal 
speech, and no wonder if they protest against a lax 
habit of representing the Deity in the guise, and 
with the passions, of a human being. Present-day 
science may strip the First Cause of the attributes 
which seem to make religion possible, and plunge 
its votaries into a still drearier scepticism; but 
there is a certain law of recoil, like that of the 
pendulum, which is sure to come back to renewed 
and larger faith. Let us therefore be tolerant 
towards science, and confident that the shadows of 
its temporary agnosticisms will pass away. 

3. A lesson of communion. The gospel of 
Christ is God revealed, full of grace and truth. 
His apostle says, ‘“‘ Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly 
worship, Him declare I unto you.” Christ gives 
us the true revelation of the character of God, and 
sets Him forth as One who gives and asks the 
purest love of which the heart can form any con- 


ception, and who is indeed wholly unverifiable by 


THE GOSPEL AND AGNOSTICISM. 59 


us unless He verify Himself in us. But this He 
_ geeks to do in every one of us. Let the belief, 
then, be vital, that the soul can commune with 
Him, can make itself heard by Him, can hear His 
word and obey it, can feel His love and return it. 
For if our life be thus hid with Christ in God, we 
shall prove it to be, not only the special blessing 
of purity, and the special source of strength in 
temptation, but the infinite spring of joy which 
eye has not seen nor ear has heard, and which it 
has not entered the heart of man to conceive. 


IRE I 
THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


“THERE are two books,” says a quaint old writer, 
“from which I collect my divinity; besides that 
written one of God, another one of His servant, 
Nature — that universal and public manuscript 
which hes expansed unto the eyes of all.” Here, 
then, are the two great revelations of God to men. 
They are the expression of His infinite mind, and 
both alike declare His glory. As each of them 
bears the broad signature of Godhead, they have a 
co-ordinate authority, and point out the only two 
realms into which it is possible for the human 
mind to perform excursions of thought. We 
cannot rise above nature in our physical inquiries ; 
man can only act, as Bacon has well shown, as the 
interpreter of nature. True science is the simple 
aud reverent interpretation of “that universal and 
public manuscript which lies expansed unto the 


eyes of all.” So, in like manner, with the written 
60 


THE GOSPEL AND. SCIENCE. 61 


record, which gives a reflection in human hearts of 
divine realities. It is the record of spiritual truth, 
as nature is the record of physical truth. In 
Scripture we have all the treasures of spiritual 
knowledge exquisitely adapted to the spiritual 
wants of man. We cannot transcend nature in 
physical discovery ; nor can we transcend Scripture 
in religious discovery. All that we can attempt to 
do is to find deeper interpretations of the two 
volumes. We cannot exhaust the immense pleni- 
tude of nature and its wonders; nor can we 
exhaust the infinite greatness of Christ and His 
gospel. They are equally authoritative revelations 
of the will of God. And so we infer that the God 
of Nature is the God of Scripture. Throughout 
the two records we trace the evident handwriting 
of one Divine Author ; they are a first and a second 
volume of the thoughts of God. There may be 
apparent discrepancies between them, as we should 
expect, where variety in unity is the apparent aim 
of each; but to say that they can really contradict 
each other, is to hold that God gives revelations 
of Himself that are suicidal and untrue. We are 
entitled, therefore, to maintain that the deductions 
of science and the teachings of Scripture will be 
at one, as the works and words of God must be, 


62 IME GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


if they are rightly interpreted. This last clause, 
‘if rightly interpreted,” is the true solvent of the 
question as bearing on the relations between 
religion and science, a vital question in this age of 
brilliant research, and one surrounded with great 
difficulty. 

An important part needs to be played by the 
Christian teacher, that of a mediator between the 
destructive and constructive forces of our time. 
Our object will be to mediate between the votaries 
of science and religion, and to show that while 
conflict may be raging on the surface, deeper 
down are to be found the most beautiful harmonies. 

I. The conflict between Science and Religion. 

Science and religion stand as representatives of 
two orders of being, and two sources of knowledge; 
and though they be distinct and independent, man 
belongs to both, and has that which answers to 
them in his twofold nature. Science takes to do 
with the phenomena of the external world, with 
whatever comes under the observation of our 
senses, and aims at grouping all facts under 
general laws. Newton brought the phenomena of 
the physical world under the great law of gravita- 
tion. Darwin connected the phenomena of organic 
life into the great law of natural selection. Scientists 


LEE, GOSPELL AND. SCIENCE. 63 


recognise the changes of force to be infinite, 
without increasing or diminishing it by a single 
particle, and summarise this truth into the great 
law of the correlation of physical forces. On the 
other hand, religion takes to do with another 
sphere beyond nature, over it and under it and in 
it, which science does not explain, but perpetually 
comes up to in the course of inquiry, and cannot 
therefore deny. Here great realities, orders, and 
forces exist, and here the origin and end of all 
things are to be found. Man himself belongs to 
this sphere, while connected by a thousand links to 
the present physical order. As a being with mind 
and self-consciousness he stands at the verge of 
matter, distinct from it, and looking off into a 
world of spirit. As a being with will and con- 
science he takes his place in a higher order of life, 
in a spiritual world, whose law is moral and 
eternal, necessary and universal, as no law which 
is physical can be. As a being with personal 
identity, subject to this moral law, he is compelled 
to recognise the fountain of it as having the same 
_ distinctive mark, and as being the Kternal Holy 
One Himself. 

Such are the two spheres, independent, yet with 
which man is inseparably connected. They have 


64 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


their postulates, which, if not eranted, lead to 
inextricable confusion and strife. Science requires 
us to believe in the unbroken uniformities of 
nature, in the regular sequence of phenomena ; 
and it is this postulate which makes the study of 
nature so infinitely interesting and_ beautiful. 
Regularities glimmer through promiscuous con- 
fusion; analogies between phenomena of a different 
order suggest themselves and stir the imagination ; 
the intellect is haunted with the sense of a vast 
unity not yet discoverable; and the spirit, fasci- 
nated by such variety, loves to discern in the 
sequences of nature the forms and operations of 
divine laws. Religion also has its postulates, and 
claims that the order of mind, of spirit, of moral 
law, is the real eternal order, of which matter is 
only the manifestation or scaffolding. ‘There is a 
higher order, of which man is a part, and God is 
the head. Man is spirit, and not matter. There 
is a spirit in man, and there is a spirit above man. 
There is a sphere beyond nature in the widest 
sense, and inclusive of nature, a universal self- 
consciousness, the source of spiritual life, with 
whom our higher being is capable of converse, to 
whom it is authoritatively subject, by whom it is 
constantly disciplined, and with whom it is destined 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 65 


to abide for ever. The denial of this, of spirit in 
man and above man, of a divine reason within him 
and governing him, involves blank materialism and 
atheism, from which, however, all science, worthy 
of the name, shrinks back in horror, thereby proving 
the reasonableness of the postulate which religion 
makes in the terms now stated by us. 

If these postulates could have been duly re- 
garded by the friends of science and the friends 
of religion, nothing could have emerged to disturb 
the amity which ought to exist between them. 
Within such ample verge the most perfect liberty 
of thought and expression ought to be allowed in 
all directions, and truth should, and even error 
may, be left to speak for themselves. While the 
cause of truth, both in science and religion, ought 
to be served with the utmost freedom of thought 
and language, and while each ought to be main- 
tained at any cost, short of logical or moral in- 
consistency, there has been perpetual danger of 
the one cause coming into conflict with the other. 
The friends of each, instead of working quietly and 
diligently side by side, have fallen out, and become 
rivals, and like hostile tribes have crossed into one 
another’s territories on destructive errands. Each 


has suspected the other of being in error or in the 
E 


66 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


wrong, and each has been too ready to exasperate 
the other to the affray. It is no doubt the case 
that only after prolonged conflict does the higher 
and better truth get any chance of asserting itself; 
but what must always be lamented is, that the 
struggle for it has been attended with so much 
bitterness and exasperation of spirit. The display 
of bias and bigotry is not confined to any one 
party; it must be traced to the fallibihty and 
prejudice common to human nature. The party 
first in the fault was the party of religion, that 
began at an early period to dread free inquiry and 
to fetter it with dogmatic restrictions. As we 
follow the stream of ecclesiastical history upwards 
through past ages, we come upon traces of ignor- 
ance, passion, and infirmity in the Church’s leaders, 
who clearly set themselves up as infallible ex- 
pounders of all truth. There was a time when 
cloistered ecclesiastics fled from the light of day, 
nor cared for the stars, as they came out every 
night to suggest the infinite wonder and glory of 
the universe. They never thought of beholding 
the glory of God in the face of nature. When 
science began to be, they reckoned it inimical to 
Scripture, and imagined they were doing God 


service by proscribing all physical inquiry, and 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 67 


reducing life to a matter of secluded contempla- 
tion. The lamp of piety borrowed none of its 
light from the splendours of creation. The 
guardians of religion did all they could to stay 
the course of scientific discovery, thundering forth 
anathemas on the head of every pioneer to new 
vistas of truth. It is well known that students 
of nature in the middle ages, like Albert the Great, 
teacher of Aquinas, and Roger Bacon, were sus- 
pected of being in league with the devil, and were 
subjected to bodily punishments or thrown into 
prison on account of their experimental researches. 
Everybody is familiar with the case of Galileo, 
Perhaps there is truth in the surmise, that the 
sanguine habit of this philosopher led him into 
tilting against the ecclesiastical authorities of his 
time; but nothing can excuse the enormous op- 
pression of those men, who compelled him, on his 
knees, to abjure what he well knew to be true, 
and what all the world now knows to be true. 
Come down to Protestant times, and the de- 
votees of science have fared not much_ better. 
_ When an illustrious, though now forgotten country- 
man of our own, Dr. Hutton, propounded his 
theory of the earth, and demanded _ indefinite 
cycles of time for the Testimony of the Locks, 


68 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


he was assailed with the most virulent abuse. 
He was called infidel, sceptic, atheist; and alas! 
it is sad to think how some have been made 
infidels by such modes of assault. Fanatical 
opponents to the teachings of geology long waged 
war with it, because it seemed to contradict the 
opening chapters of the Bible, and they persisted 
in attempts to throw discredit on the new science. 
It was the same when Charles Darwin published 
the Origin of Species and Descent of Man, and set 
forth the doctrine of natural selection identified 
with his name. The anathemas which his works 
provoked from the orthodox are still fresh in our 
memory. All the resources of ridicule, scorn, and 
abuse were poured out upon the great naturalist, 
who calmly continued his researches, heeding not 
the storm which ignorance and passion gathered 
about him. 

Enough has been said of the hostility of religion 
to science. In these later days a great change in 
their relations to one another has taken place. 
Since the Reformation, free inquiry has been the 
motto written on the banner of Protestant nations. 
The law of progress has carried us far into the 
domains of nature, and revealed to us a kind of 
fairyland of things wonderful. In this grand 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 69 


march of mind, science has with adventurous stride 
not only skirted the borders, but likewise passed 
far into the domain of the higher revelation, and 
it has done so in a spirit of opposition and defiance, 
intensified by the memory of past persecutions and 
the pride of great and brilliant discoveries. It 
rebels against the traditional view of the universe 
which religion imposes as dogma, and to maintain 
which it fetters the freedom of inquiry. Science 
proclaims itself not a mere rebel against the reign- 
ing religion, but a rival religion. The change in 
its tone is very marked of late. The scientist 
assumes the air of a priest, claims to be a priest 
of truth, and asks with lofty self-consciousness 
what any Christian priest can have to say to him. 
When the subject is theology or religion, he treats 
it as something sentimental or unreal, and thinks 
that the edge of controversy cannot be too sharp, 
and insensibly takes the crusader and the iconoclast 
for his models. We have no desire to exaggerate 
differences, to cultivate a taste for discord, or to 
write a book, as Draper has done, on the Conflict — 
of Religion and Science, but there can be no 
doubt that the antagonism between the two is 
very real in our day. Patient, disinterested study 
of the visible world, instead of leaving men of 


70 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


science, as we should expect, awestruck on the 
threshold of the invisible world, does in fact, at 
the present day, take them far away from it, till 
it seems to have no existence. “The invisible 
things of God are clearly seen, being understood 
by the things that are made,” said the apostle. 
“The invisible things of God are possibly nothing 
at all,” say quite sincerely those who know far 
more of things that are made than Paul or any one 
else in any former age of the world’s history could 
know. And this aversion to religion leaves the 
votaries of science in a world of forces blind, deaf, 
and senseless; reckless of the havoc they make and 
the hopes they destroy. Science makes nature, in 
the garb of fate and necessity, shut out God, and 
leaves men with consciences and hearts to be 
crushed as the moth in a world of pitiless fact. 

In the first flush of victorious research the man 
of science began to cherish a consciousness of intel- 
lectual pride. He came back from excursions into 
nature with discoveries that seemed to explode the 
authority of Scripture. He arrayed himself with 
startling facts that conflicted with the orthodoxy 
of the Church. This provoked the theologian to 
take the field. With mind unskilled in scientific 
method, how did he meet the adversary? ‘l'oo 


THE GOSPEL AND.-SCIENCE. 71 


often with rash denunciation and wretched narrow- 
mindedness. He laid about him with weapons 
which, if they did not cut deep, made a ringing 
noise in their fall. He thought he had only to 
speak ex cathedrd, and the facts of science would 
be demolished. Many whose veneration for the 
theologian was unbounded swallowed his infallible 
pretension, but the man of science, not so easily 
duped, saw through the dignified oracle, and be- 
came a few degrees more sceptical. The theologian 
was apt to regard every new message from nature 
with suspicion, to dread every discovery of the 
philosopher as an arrow flung at religion, and to 
regard science as tendering her help, when she 
did so, only that she might more slyly give her 
companion’s crutch a kick, and leave him sprawling 
in the mire. 

If dogmatism was the fault of the theologian, 
can the man of science be counted free from it? 
Prejudice, narrow-mindedness, want of charity, do 
not belong to one class; they lie deeper down 
than theology, politics, and science ; they are part 
of the common depravity that taints our race. 
It is too much the fashion to hurl jibes at the 
defenders of old beliefs, and treat them with 
supercilious contempt. This is not charity; it 1s 


72 THE’ GOSPEL AND ‘SCIENGE, 


something quite the reverse, and unworthy of 
what men owe to one another, wherever engaged 
in the pursuit of truth. The fact is, that the 
charge made against the champion of faith may 
with equal force be retorted on the man of science. 
Has not the spirit of dogmatic confidence largely 
changed sides? ‘ You tell me,” says Henry Rogers, 
“that the theologian believes a dogma because it 
is old; and do not our modern speculators often 
believe their shining novelties, for a similar, though 
an opposite reason, just because they are new? 
You tell me that many cling to certain opinions 
because they wish the Bible to be true; and is it 
not too evident, from the tone of many, that they 
think an opinion charming because they wish the 
Bible to be false? You tell us that, of course, 
this or that work, in defence of an ‘effete ortho- 
doxy,’ is received with praise by all the orthodox 
journals, and that we can tell beforehand the 
organs that will applaud. And cannot we do the 
same in reference to any novel bit of heterodoxy ? 
Can we not lay our finger beforehand on the very 
journals that will pet and patronize that, even 
though it be directly in the teeth of some other 
heterodoxy, which it has already petted and 
patronized?” There is an odiwin seientificum as 


Car COSPEL, AND SCIENEL. 73 


well as an odium theologicum, and they are both 
alike odious, not as the fruit of theology or science, 
but of the passion and prejudice inherent in human 
nature. From the squabbles of the past we should 
learn to guard against being carried away by in- 
temperate zeal into controversy, where, after all, 
we may only be fighting with a windmill, and, 
after making ourselves ridiculous, be forced to quit 
the arena crestfallen and with trailing plumes. 
And if theology will part with the conceit of 
assuming to be “queen of the sciences,” and clothe 
itself with humility, and be willing to accept a 
report from the other side, it will lead to good 
feeling, and secure respectful acknowledgment of 
each other’s conclusions. 

Another cause of strife is the proneness of science 
to hasty generalisation. In giving his inductive 
method to the world, Lord Bacon observes that, 
“through the premature and precipitate hurry of 
the understanding, great danger may be appre- 
hended ;” and since his time ample proof has been 
given of a tendency to arrive at conclusions from 
imperfect data, and of the dogmatic complacency 
with which these conclusions have been announced. 
But how often have they been reversed and over- 
turned! Science has had its share of controversies 


74 THE GOSPEL‘ AND: SCIENCE. 


within its own borders, and its own votaries have 
been fiercely arrayed against each other. Its dis- 
ciples, like theologians, have had to recant their 
errors or modify their first conclusions. Leibnitz 
charged the system of Newton with being irre- 
ligious, and Humboldt joined in the same charge. 
Benjamin Franklin’s views on electricity were 
ridiculed in the Royal Society of London, and 
are now accepted as sound. The old doctrine 
of the planets being kept in their course by a 
balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces 1s 
now exploded. Count Rumford’s experiments on 
heat and energy in the end of last century were 
neglected for forty years, and are now part 
of established science. Darwin, with admirable 
moderation, stated the origin of life to be from a 
few humble progenitors, but many of his followers 
believe in spontaneous generation, while admitting 
there is not a particle of scientific proof for it. It 
is something like the old authority in religion, 
which sets up dogmas, and proceeds to denounce 
when belief is withheld. The creed of science in 
many quarters is coming to be that the laws of 
matter are capable of accounting for everything ; 
that all the capacities of sensation, consciousness, 
and thought lie hid in protoplasm or star-dust. 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 75 


Science gives no proof of this. Huxley calls it an 
act of philosophic faith, but it is only an unveri- 
fied dogma—a prejudiced superstition of science. 
Errors and assumptions of this kind pass for 
scientific knowledge, and are inevitable to fallible 
men in quest of truth. There is need of modesty 
and caution in accepting new theories for these 
three reasons. The great lawgiver of experimental 
science advises care and circumspection. Next, 
science is ever-changing and incomplete. The 
darling theory of to-day may be upset by new 
facts to-morrow. And then hasty induction should 
profit from past mistakes, for who needs to be told 
what startling conclusions have been announced 
by rash inquirers—conclusions which would have 
torn up the roots of religion, but which, after care- 
ful examination, have been found to corroborate 
the teachings of religion ? 

Another cause of conflict arises out of the fear 
of open and candid inquiry. Defenders of the 
faith have been disposed to distrust physical 
researches, to look askance upon them instead of 
looking into them. And students of science 
think that the theologian dare not trust himself 
to new light, and would rather quench it if he 


could. Now, we must not be afraid of inquiry 


76 THE’ GOSPEL AND. SCIENCE. 


nor of debate, if conducted with candour and 
charity. Truth must be self-consistent; and 
“truth, like a torch, the more it is shook, it 
shines.” Let there be no repression or conceal- 
ment. We should meet the men of science 
half-way, and say, “Next to truth itself, 
frankness of speech; give us all your facts, and 
let us make truth, for its own sake, our common 
search.” Had we such candour of spirit on both 
sides, there would never be occasion for alarm. 
If one lesson is more clearly demonstrated than 
another in these conflicts, it is the vitality of 
religion. The timid believer has only to behold 
the arena of controversy, where the Word of God 
has broken lances with a thousand redoubtakle 
foes, there to see the object of his reverence stand- 
ing erect and alone in its pristine vigour. Since 
the birth of science, the Bible has stood the brunt 
of an incessant warfare, and yet it is clothed in 
more than the panoply of its ancient power. It 
has taken up its own position in the world; 
stands there to proclaim the divine origin and 
destiny of man, and cannot be ejected. The trial 
of its strength has always issued in good. Every 
onset has proved the plenitude of its inherent 
vitality and the perpetual freshness of its power. 


fuse GOol il, AID SCLENCE. 77 


Champion after champion has fallen prostrate at 
its feet ; after they have done their utmost to lay 
it low, and failed, it has stripped the conquered 
of their armour, and adorned itself. 

II. The harmony between Science and Religion. 

The two provinces, though distinct, cannot be 
kept in total isolation from one another. It is 
true that a marked difference exists between the 
two kinds of truth set forth in the two revela- 
tions. One is the supernatural domain of God's 
manifestation: the other is the natural. These 
two departments of truth are very different, but 
not at variance ; widely apart at some points, but 
never at an infinite distance, or opposed. It is 
not always easy to define the marches, or for 
students to keep within their respective borders. 
The theologian should not dictate to the man of 
science regarding any natural fact which the latter 
has verified, and when the man of science leaves the 
domain of physics, and begins to talk metaphysics, 
he may be no authority worth heeding, and may 
rather be suspected of trespass. But the two 
provinces dovetail into one another. Some think 
that the two kinds of truth are unrelated, and that 
no search for harmony should be made. They 
come out of the hostile camps, bearing a flag of 


78 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE, 


truce, and saying, ‘‘ Keep to your province, and we 
will keep to ours. They have nothing to do with 
each other.” Such counsel leads to nothing but 
an armed neutrality ; 1t is dangerous reasoning, for 
every one truth, wherever we find it, is linked on 
to every other truth in this wnwverse of God. Any 
collision that has occurred is due not to difference 
in the records themselves, but in our interpreta- 
tion of the one or the other, or of both. The 
fault is not in either record, but in man’s reading 
of it. The words and the works of God cannot 
be at variance. Science is a fallible thing, and 
so is theology. Why? Because they are man’s 
readings of the two records. But the records are 
true. Why? Because they come from God. 
This solution of difficulties cannot be too simply 
or persistently asserted. 

The history of science furnishes proof enough of 
real harmony with religion. Galileo was dragged 
to the prison of the Inquisition for publishing his 
discovery ; it was held wicked to believe that the 
earth went round the sun. Under the tortures 
of the rack, he was forced to renounce his con- 
viction, though it always returned with over- 
powering force, and made him say, “It does 
move, though.” Nowadays, we cannot imagine 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 79 


the alarm created in the Church by Galileo’s 
discovery. Yet all the difficulty arose from a 
false interpretation of the theologian, who had 
accepted a literal reading of the sun rising and 
setting, and dogmatically clung to it till the truth 
of Galileo’s discovery could no longer be questioned. 
Then some more sagacious divine entered the 
enemy's camp, accepted the discovery, and closed 
the conflict by showing that Scripture speaks of 
the sun rising and setting in a popular, and not 
scientific, sense. That explanation removed all 
anxiety. Both parties are agreed, while the dis- 
closures of astronomy from the days of Galileo to 
the time of Herschel have been grandly inter- 
preting the words of the Psalm, “ When I consider 
Thy heavens, the work of Thy hands, the moon 
and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is 
man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son 
of man, that Thou visitest him?” Again, it was 
a startling demand to make by the Huttonian 
theory of the earth that countless ages were 
required for the compilations of the rocky volume, 
_ instead of six or seven thousand years, so long the 
traditional belief of the Church. It seemed as if 
the opening chapters of Genesis must be untrue ; 
friends of the Bible were thrown into panic, and in 


80 ; THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


these new scientific doctrines they detected the 
cloven hoof of infidelity. So did the conflict rage 
till Chalmers came forward with his broader 
interpretation to set it at rest, while the researches 
of geology are helping to elucidate the truth of 
another Psalm: “A thousand years in Thy sight 
are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a 
watch in the night.” 

Schemes of reconciliation between Genesis and 
science have often been attempted, though not so 
much of late, because such attempts can never 
secure literal harmony, and because both sides 
now perceive that the Bible account of creation 
does not profess to teach the science of the matter 
at all. In writing it, the purpose was not to 
anticipate the discoveries of physical science, or 
the labours of such students as Copernicus, Newton, 
and Darwin. The two accounts are in different 
regions, and differ in spirit and aim as much as 
they do in details. Too much has been made of 
the days of creation in the Bible record, whether 
as literal days of twenty-four hours or long periods. 
They are not referred to in the subsequent course 
of revelation. In Psalm civ., where the same 
order of creation is given, the number of days 
and the chronological divisions are dropped as 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 81 


unimportant, because they seem to be merely a 
Hebrew framework or setting, accidental rather 
than essential to the account, suggesting, if they 
were meant to convey any lesson, that creation 
was not a timeless, instantaneous act, but a gra- 
dual orderly process, which is the master-theory 
of modern times. It is the moral and spiritual 
purpose that forms the inspiring element in the 
mind of the sacred cosmogonist. ‘He had to teach 
that the world as we see it, and all therein con- 
tained, was created out of nothing; and that the 
spiritual and not the material was the source of all 
existence. He had to teach that the creation was 
not merely orderly, but progressive; going from 
the formless to the formed ; from the orderless to 
the ordered; from the inanimate to the animate ; 
from the plant to the animal; from the lower 
animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; 
ending with the rest of the Sabbath, the type of 
the highest, the spiritual life.’’’ 
the magnificent Hymn of Creation with which 


Here then, in 


Scripture opens, and which tallies so exactly 
with the modern doctrine of evolution, we have 
demonstrated the prescient wisdom of God in 
dictating inspired statements which, while they do 


1 Relations between Religion and Science ; Bishop Temple. 
F 


82 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE, 


not conflict with the popular notions of an 
unscientific age, can yet be reconciled with the 
discoveries of the nineteenth century. 

The doctrine of evolution is thought to be un- 
favourable to religion, but in the best and truest 
sense of the term Scripture is evolutionary, and 
religion as well as science participates in the light 
shed by that great modern doctrine. Two distinct 
accounts of man’s origin and nature are given in 
the first two chapters of Genesis. His supremacy 
among the creatures, as having been made in the 
image of God, is taught in the first chapter, and 
science declares him to be the highest product of 
nature—the crown of creation. The sacred record 
also intimates that he has been formed out of the 
dust of the ground, possesses a material nature 
like other earthly organisms; while science busies 
itself with the links which relate him to creatures 
from below. The law of evolution, as one aftect- 
ing every realm of nature, and operating too in 
the sphere of religion, now obtains general recog- 
nition, though many gaps in the theory are not 
filled up, and some of its fundamental factors are 
unknown. It postulates something, for it does 
not undertake to evolve something out of nothing. 
It requires something vital, for it cannot explain 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. Ne 


the eiaclitng of life fron Hea matter. It cannot 
explain the powers of reproduction, of variation, 
and of inheritance. So that it needs to assume the 
great mysteries of creation, of life, of generation, 
of variability, and of heredity. There is nothing 
in Darwin’s theory inconsistent with belief in a 
Creator. His books might be adopted as the 
scientific text-books of any religious system of 
education. The theory of evolution cannot touch 
the question of final causes, or invalidate Paley’s 
argument from design, as it is concerned with the 
how, and not with the why of things. It only 
introduces a change in the method of execution, 
and shows design working, not by special acts 
of creation, but by slow, self-acting processes of 
development. Under this aspect the field of 
illustration for Paley’s argument is only vastly 
enlarged by the theory of evolution. ‘No other 
theory of the universe seems to require in such 
vast proportions the elements of forethought, 
purpose, and forecast of the end from the begin- 
ning. Who can believe that anything is unfolded 
in fact which has not been unfolded in thought ? 
Who can take into his hand a seed, and consider 
the marvellous forces and powers wrapped up in 
that little thing,—consider the predestination of 


84 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


which it is the subject, the definite ends and aims 
to which it is directed, separate from those of all 
other seeds,—and not feel something lke awe, 
something like conviction that nothing but 
prescience could have created such a thing! 
And the seed is the type and incarnation of the 
doctrine of evolution.” When the evolutionist 
says, “Give me the smallest organism, and I will 
show you how all living creatures have been 
formed : give me the smallest spark of conscious- 
ness, and I will show how man’s mental and 
spiritual nature has come about,” there 1s no 
need to suspect him of trying to get rid of a 
Divine Creator. For to think that God did not 
make the organisms of this world because they 
had small beginnings, is to think that God did 
not make the tree because it grew out of a little 
seed, that He did not make the butterfly because 
it first appeared as a grub, that He did not make 
man because he is born a baby. 

Of course, there is a form of evolution held by 
some students of science who wish to dispense 
with the need of a creator, and prefer to believe 
that the world made itself. They claim more or 
less to explain the universe by matter and im- 
personal force: they claim a right to say that life 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 85 


arose from spontaneous generation, that the grey 
matter of the brain originates thought, that the 
beast is the true ancestor of man, and that man’s 
intellectual, moral, and sesthetic faculties are subtle 
products of matter and force. The theory has just 
to be stated to prove it a heap of huge assumptions, 
without a single particle of scientific proof. It is 
hoped and believed that evidence will yet be found, 
_ and natural selection, or the broader principle of 
the correlation of physical forces, is the magician’s 
wand that gives being to them all. The ablest 
men of science acknowledge the impossibility of 
explaining even the most imperfect indications of 
life, the blunt sensations of lowest organisms, by 
the mechanism of physical forces; and how is it 
possible, then, to explain such faculties as con- 
sclousnesss, reason, will, and conscience in the 
same way? Only go deep enough, and the most 
obstinate materialist may be made to see that 
matter is not all the universe, nor mind the out- 
come of trembling atoms. Nature is a great unity 
with all its variety, and it has not been ushered 
into existence at once, but evolved in a continual 
process up to man, and the process has not been 
left to accidental or mechanical forces of variation 
from below; it has been guided by typical prin- 


86 THE GOSPELAND SCIENCE, 


ciples and ideal purposes which it is the high 
distinction of man consciously to realise. There 
lies at the foundation of nature, not merely an 
external law, rigid or fortuitous, but a rational, 
logical, and especially a moral ideal to account for 
its marvellous unity. Further investigations into 
nature can only confirm this. We need have no 
fear of true science, however much we may have 
of false science and of false theology too, But the 
tendencies of modern science, if carefully read, 
point towards a sublime spirituality—towards the 
belief that all matter is but force, and all force is 
but mind. The substance of all phenomena, of all 
thought, of all manifestation, is God, or of God. 

If evolution be an ascending and all-including 
plan and progress already in the eternal mind, 
then it is in no way derogatory to the dignity of 
man to teach that he had formerly his origin in 
these processes of nature, that he derives his 
physical, and even his mental structure, without 
a break of continuity, from the creatures beneath 
him. Ifit shall be found that the ascent of species 
has proceeded by insensible variations and accumu- 
lations of these from below, we must admit that 
the Power directing these processes wrought in this 
fashion up to man, unfolding in him those elements 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 87 


which are his specific signature, and are wanting 
everywhere else in nature. It is not robbing man 
of his dignity, or degrading him to the level of the 
brutes, to recognise processes which, while linking 
him to the other tenants of our globe, have lifted 
him to a place immeasureably above them. His 
dignity consists in what he now is, in his posses- 
sion of a moral and spiritual nature. But let us 
not speak of the brutes with contempt, as though 
they had nothing of their Maker in them. What 
cause for shame is it to be organically linked with 
the brooding care of a brute for her young, the 
self-sacrifice of a lioness dying for her whelps, or 
the fidelity of a dog dying for his master? There 
is no reason to be ashamed of such kinship. In- 
deed, the impulse which makes the mother delight 
in shielding and nourishing and educating the 
little creatures committed to her charge, is just on 
a limited scale that love which we ascribe to our 
Saviour, and it contains potentially what needs 
only more sympathy or intelligence to transform 
it into that very same love which John describes 
as the highest attribute of God. 

Evolution is an incomplete theory; there 1s 
many a break of continuity. The origin of life is 


a break at the lower end, and at the upper end 


88 LHE GOSPELTAND SCIEWCE, 
SARL amb R Rimal KS ESS LV Chine lee watt Pee SG St» 


self-consciousness is another. It is impossible to 
indicate the steps by which self-consciousness has 
arisen from lower stages of animal life—it is a 
closed circle to the purely organic world. It 
makes man into a new and wonderful personality, 
and makes him distinct from the rest of creation. 
It turns him from the under world to gaze on a 
world above him, as that to which his highest 
affinities point, and in which he must learn to live 
and move and have his being. When self-con- 
sclousness appears on the scene, like the appearance 
of life, it marks the beginning of a series to which 
the preceding served only as a condition. To 
naturalist and theologian alike it must appear that 
the realisation and revelation of the original idea 
of humanity is the determining principle for which 
all things in nature existed as means. Instead of 
making man the product of the animal world, it is 
far more likely that the animal world is evolved 
from the idea of humanity. From the beginning, 
the processes of nature have been tending towards 
man as their ultimate end, Lvolution, as a general 
law or method, does not go on for ever developing 
into new forms. The process has its limits or end 
in the case of each species. It produces a species 
of plant or animal by the laws of descent and 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 89 


variation, and having done so, it leaves that 
species at a completed stage, and goes no further. 
Development proceeds in definite directions to 
termini or adult conditions. Hence the perman- 
ence of species, and hence the reason why you see 
no evolution going on now. ‘The story of life 
on our earth is a story of ordered and completed 
evolution. Man has reached the end of his 
physical evolution, and cannot rise into a higher 
species of being. His structure now does not 
surpass the perfection it reached in Egypt or 
Greece, though it has had time enough to develop 
and preserve any variations. ‘The definite lines 
of development on which the head had gradually 
risen to the perfection exhibited by the classic 
sculptors are incapable of being carried further ; 
the face is carried back under the skull so far that 
it could not be carried back to a greater extent, 
and leave room for teeth, tongue, and throat.” 
Physical evolution is completed in man, who is its 
terminus and crown; and the evolutions of the 
future must be sought in realms with which the 
naturalist acknowledges that he has nothing to do, 
and take origin out of the special and distinguish- 
ing attributes of man. There the laws of struggle 
for existence, natural selection, heredity, and 


go THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. 


variation have new fields of activity, and there 
other evolutions are shown to be at work, and 
more will appear. 

By the possession of self-consciousness, reason, 
will, and conscience, man stands related to a world 
above him. As a personal being, he rises above 
nature; has in him the power of new beginnings, 
of choosing between motives, of initiating new acts, 
and forecasting his destiny. What worlds of new 
evolution open out to a being with such capacities ! 
Religion and faith, its instrument, beckon him to 
these vistas and new blessed ascents. ssentially, 
man is a spirit clothed in a-bodily form. His 
spiritual essence links him to orders of intelligence 
above him, as his body connects him with the 
animal world below him. ‘“ He becomes, as it were, 
the whole creation, and its whole struggle is 
repeated in him and by him, but in conjunction 
with other factors and on another stage. Heredity 
conserves and strives to fix the past, but the moral 
within him, and the spiritual environment around 
him, contend against heredity, and select and 
nourish that which is best. The animal is kept 
down and crowded out, giving place to intellectual 
and moral and spiritual habits and qualities. 

The methods and features are evolutionary, but he 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE. gI 


himself is the force presiding over all, resisting or 
co-operating with Him who is over and in all.” It 
is an advantage in the theory of evolution over 
others that it brings God nearer to the world. It 
has taught us to see that God is not adequately 
described as a great Artificer who made the world 
complete by an original fiat, and then sat apart 
from His creation, but as immanent in all His 
creatures, a constant and all-pervasive factor. It 
has taught us that God is present and operative 
through law in spiritual as in physical matters. 

Life, seen in the lieht of its highest conscious- 
ness, means the attractive power of One who would 
draw all creatures into communion with Himself. 
Let us live our life in Him who has come near 
to us as the Word of God, who became flesh in 
Jesus Christ, now and always the life and the light 
of men. Let us accord to the fulness of divine 
power and wisdom and condescension, a closer and 
larger place in our experience. Let us live in con- 
tact with the Infinite Spirit who ever waits to flood 
our own. God is not exhausted, and we are still 
unfinished creatures ; but we have eternity before 
us, and through it we shall pass into greater fulness 
of being, as we approach nearer and ever nearer 
the one Source of all. 


IV. 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE—THE LAW 
OF HEREDITY, 


Ir had long been recognised among men, as a fact 
beyond dispute, that any advantageous quality, 
once acquired, will be preserved, and then passed 
on from generation to generation, but only within 
recent years has it been raised to the position of 
a great scientific law. Men had long observed that 
such an aptitude as that which belonged to a 
shepherd’s or sportsman’s dog must be hereditary, 
and that in many of the affairs of human life, for 
good or ill, experience is handed on from sire to 
offspring ; but it was reserved for students of 
science to extend indefinitely the working of the 
process, and explain by its aid many of the 
phenomena connected with plant and animal life. 
Darwin finds the whole explanation of organic 
forms under the law of heredity, conjoined with 
the law of variation. The quintessence of his 
theory represents the process of nature as one of 


THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 93 


minute variations continued and accumulated 
through long tracts of time. How this process 
operates, and why, can as yet be very indistinctly 
known. In what way any useful peculiarity is 
passed on by descent, whether by an impression 
upon a nerve, or a force conveyed to some secret 
cell, or a quality infused into the blood, the man 
of science cannot explain; but the fact is indisput- 
able, that characters are inherited, do become in 
course of time impressed upon the elements of the 
embryo, and are converted into a property or 
strain of the race. Darwin confesses that science 
throws no light on this process. In the first 
chapter of his Origin of Species, he says: “The 
laws governing inheritance are quite unknown. No 
one can say why the same peculiarity in different 
individuals of the same species, and in individuals 
of different species, is sometimes inherited and 
sometimes not so; why it often reverts, in certain 
characters, to its grandfather or grandmother, or 
other much more remote ancestor; why a peculi- 
arity is often transmitted from one sex to both 
sexes, or to one sex alone, more commonly, but not 
exclusively, to the like sex.” The Darwinian 
theory cannot account for the beginning of heredity 
or of variation, though it may explain in some 


94 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


measure the gradations of these processes in the 
evolution of life. It tends, in an exaggerated 
form, to regard acquired characters as inheritable. 
Heredity is not so much a power as a process, not 
so much a force as a short way of expressing a 
series of facts, the how and why of which are too 
deep for man to fathom. But the aptitudes and 
tastes of ancestry are communicated, though in 
ways unknown, to their descendants, and the 
process which men of science find to be at work in 
nature is found to operate still more mysteriously 
and impressively in the sphere of moral and 
religious experience. 

Good service is rendered to the cause of religion © 
when we can trace ‘natural law in the spiritual 
world.” The brilliant generalisations of modern 
science may be turned by the true mediator 
between science and religion into a faithful source 
of illustration regarding the higher processes and 
laws of human life. Laws of biogenesis, degenera- 
tion, and environment have been treated after this 
manner, and such treatment has proved eminently 
helpful to the faith of Christians. It is a service 
capable of indefinite expansion, and we may carry 
it out still further by a consideration of the two 
laws which are taken to explain the evolution of 


THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 95 


life on our globe. In this chapter we confine our 
illustrations to what men of science have called the 
doctrine of heredity. It is the cumulative or 
conservative law of creation. We see it operating 
everywhere in familiar ways; we can follow it a 
little way into some of its graver moral issues ; and 
then we may reach its highest form, as that young 
and forward thinker, Elihu, recognised it in the 
words, “The Spirit of God hath made me, and 
the breath of the Almighty hath given me life ;” or 
as Paul read its momentous bearing in profound 
words about the offence of one involving the race 
in condemnation and death, and about the obedience 
of One lifting the race, as its second Head, to 
justification and eternal life. 

I. The Law of Heredity wn the natural world. 

When a man of science elucidates this principle, 
he points out that each plant or animal produces 
others of like kind with itself. The cone of a fir- 
tree does not produce a beech or an oak, nor does 
the egg of a fish produce a serpent. Within 
definite and fixed limits does the law work. 
Nature does not infinitely disport herself here, or 
allow differences to upset her arrangement of 
likeness of kind. Instead of differences advancing 


to something new, we see a constant return of 


96 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


differences into the old. The breeder knows that, 
do as he will, his breeds will, as soon as they are 
left alone, turn back to what they were at first. 
This likeness of kind consists, first of all, in a 
sameness of general structure, and then in a 
repetition of individual peculiarities. Without 
going so far back into the permanent structure of 
organic life, and its reproduction in such exact 
forms, we can see the law variously at work in the 
transmission of aptitudes and habits that belong to 
animal life. The student of biology tells us that 
the instincts of the lower creatures, such as bees 
and ants, are the result of stored-up knowledge, 
accumulated from observation and experience, and 
passed on through a long line of descent. When 
we come to study the aptitudes of man, the same 
law finds abundant illustrations. Certain capacities 
of workmanship have been acquired ages ago, and 
continue to be the peculiar heritage of the people 
that have cultivated them. There were in Egypt, 
and there are still in India and the Hast, hereditary 
castes of craftsmen who, by repetition continued 
through ages, become or still are, in certain 
patterns, faultless workmen, acquiring an in- 
stinctive aptitude for their work. The enameller 
of India will hand you a bit of enamel as brightly 


THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 97 


green as the emerald, or as fiery red as the ruby ; 
the bird-painter of Japan will draw you bird- 
attitudes and all the phenomena of fight with a 
skill simply unrivalled. Such artistic capacity has 
run in the blood for generations till those who have 
acquired it possess an instinct for it, and can show 
it, when nearly sleeping, as accurately as when 
awake. Proofs of the hereditary transmission of 
tendencies to special movements are numerous, 
and may be frequently observed. Gestures, often 
peculiar to individuals, and_ tricks, involuntary 
with many persons, have been repeated in suc- 
cessive generations under circumstances that forbid 
the idea of their having been learned by imitation. 
“On what a curious combination of corporeal 
structure, mental character, and training,” says 
Darwin, “must handwriting depend! Yet every 
one must have noted the occasional close similarity 
of the handwriting in father and son, although the 
father had not taught the son.” It is said that 
Lord Brougham’s handwriting bore a close resem- 
blance not to his father’s, but to his grandfather’s, 
whose style had never been seen till his own was 
formed. Biologists tell us that large hands are 
inherited by men and women whose ancestors spent 


laborious lives, and that small hands are possessed 
G 


98 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


by those whose descent, for many generations, has 
been from ancestors unused to manual toil. It is 
observed that not only are forms of structure, but 
slight differences among them, bequeathed from 
ceneration to generation. Peculiarities, even of a 
microscopic kind, are transmissible by inheritance. 
The fact is likewise proved, as Brougham’s hand- 
writing shows, that a person is capable of trans- 
mitting ancestral peculiarities to his children, though 
they have not achieved development in himself. 
It would seem as if everything that reached us 
from our ancestors must have been infixed some- 
where within our organisation, packed into cells or 
germs which the native eye could never search out; 
and though these ancestral peculiarities do not 
come to the surface in our own bodily structure, 
they will be bequeathed to one or more of our 
descendants. This reappearance in offspring of 
traits not borne by parents, but by grandparents 
or remoter ancestors, is an exemplification of the 
law of heredity which can “be proved by many 
evidences. In the picture galleries of old families, 
or in the monumental brasses of churches, may be 
often seen types of features that are still, from time 
time, reproduced in members of these families. 
Such repetition extends to features so slight asa 


THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 99 


Oe ee 


cast of the eye, or a gesture of the hand, or a habit 
of walking. Peculiarities of mind and temper 
appear and reappear in families. It is matter of 
common remark that some constitutional cliseases, 
both physical and mental, are certainly and 
conspicuously hereditary. Many illustrations of 
functional heredity could be adduced. Why is 
this man rich? Because his father was active, 
honest, laborious, and frugal; the father practised 
these virtues, transmitted them, and the son reaps 
their reward. Why is that other man feeble, 
suffermg, and unhappy? Because hig father, 
gifted with a powerful constitution, abused it by 
debauchery and intemperance. Propensities to 
drink, to gambling, and to improvidence appear 
to run in the blood from sire to son. One observes 
the frequent production, by highly endowed men, 
of men still more highly endowed with the same 
talents. Darwin, who had excessive faith in 
heredity, delighted to trace his qualities back 
through several generations of his forebears. His 
grandfather, the celebrated author of the Zoonomia, 
and others of his ancestors, showed a great liking 
for natural history, and doubtless the qualities 
of a naturalist had become inherent ip the 
strain. So it has been in regard to the gift of 


1co THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


music. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were all sons 
of men that had unusual musical powers. To tell 
the truth, there 1s not a man on earth whose 
condition has not been determined by myriads of 
facts and forces with which the determination of 
his own will had nothing to do. And this law 
of heredity extends to the formation of moral 
character. Bad traits descend to the third and 
fourth generation ; to the third and fourth genera- 
tion good traits also descend. The law is a sword 
with two edges, and the hilt is in a sure and 
mighty Hand. It belongs to virtue as much as 
to vice. There is an Ebal as well as a Gerizim 
in the government of the world. The law of 
heredity publishes alike the blessing and the curse. 
It does not explain, but it verifies and confirms 
a doctrine of Scripture, which is as truly a fact 
of human experience as it is a doctrine of Scrip- 
ture, namely, the principle of evil in the hearts of 
all, the doctrine of original sin. Whence comes 
this evil power? From an act of humanity, of 
which we are all members, an act which has 
corrupted human nature as it exists in each of us. 
This doctrine gives great offence to superficial 
minds, but never to that profound common sense 


which is_ the expression of reason and the judge 


Tae BAW OF HEREDITY. 10L 


of truth. The human race is bound together, 
and forms a mysterious but real unity, so that 
the taint which entered it at its fountain-head 
extends to each and all. Look at it in the light 
of the great law of heredity, and you see that one 
man suffers for the faults of another, or he enjoys 
the advantages resulting from the good actions of 
others. Because this law presses so heavily on its 
evil side, some are disposed to argue that man is 
the creature of circumstances, that his character 
has been formed for him, that a law of necessity 
holds him down, that accountability is impossible, 
and retribution a dream. As one has said, “I 
feel that [ am as completely the result of my 
nature, and impelled to do what I do, as the needle 
to point to the north, or the puppet to move 
according as the string is pulled.” Such is the 
strongest argument of modern fatalism; but it 
pushes the law of heredity too far, and the simple 
rejoinder is enough that every man has consciously 
a free-will power that makes him a real agent in 
the affairs of his existence, and a conscience that 
writes the statute of retribution plainly on the 
walls of his innermost being. The crown and 
glory of our nature and its loftiest distinction from 
the brute is, that we can elevate ourselves, resist 


102 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


inherited taints, improve our best faculties, form 
increasingly noble habits, and, by the exercise of 
self-discipline, mount high above our original 
selves. If the law of heredity brings hardship 
and pain, who does not see that its terrific gravity, 
instead of being an injustice, is a proclamation to 
every man at once to set about instituting a 
reform? The hope of self-change is never re- 
linquished by any human being, except he be an 
incurable trifler or a vice-besotted wretch. Is he 
so poor a creature that he cannot fight against 
the foes of his purity and peace? If it be true of 
civil hberty, 


“Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow,” 


then let him strike the blow for freedom, and not 
lie down in sin like a moral dastard or degenerate 
enervated sot. 

Il. The Law of Heredity in the spiritual world. 

Our inquiry prepares us to look at our highest 
origin. ‘We have an ancestry which goes back 
beyond maternity, beyond the flesh, beyond 
nature. We have a pedigree which is older than 
the mountains, older than the stars, older than 
the universe.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, giving ex- 
pression to this law of heredity, says that most 


tai Lal OF HEREDITY Y. 103 


can be cured if a physician be called early enouch. 
“Yes,” he replies, ‘ but early enough would com- 
monly be two hundred years in advance.” Just 
as a fir-tree may be said to have existed in germ 
a thousand or ten thousand years ago, at the 
origin of its species, so every man, before his 
personal appearing, existed in humanity. You are 
twenty-two years old, thirty-five, or sixty. That 
is your age as an individual, but as man it is the 
age of humanity, so that you are all much older 
than you think, for you are as old as the first man. 
But we have a still older and higher descent— 
older and higher than the stars. ‘“ We are come 
from a good stock; we are branches of a high 
family tree; we are scions of a noble house, a 
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” 
“The Spirit of God has made us, and the breath 
of the Almighty has given us life.” Calvin and 
the theologians trace our origin to the first Adam, 
tell us that we fell with him, and inherit from him 
a corrupt nature, and declare our nature to be 
totally depraved. And they leave us there. But 
the truth is only half told, and a part of the truth 
which most of all crushes hope out of us. Now, 


Scripture attests that, however sinful and corrupt 


104 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE 


we may be, still we have a splendid origin. The 
Gospels trace our genealogy up not only to Adam, 
but far beyond, when they say that he was the 
son of God. Christ sets forth in the parable of 
the Prodigal Son that man, the sinner, away in 
the far country, is still God’s child, and that 
visions of the Fatherhood which came to him 
there, induced him to arise and return to the home 
where all things good and true in plenty were to 
be found. Paul, the apostle, when addressing the 
men of Athens on Mars’ Hill, quoted one of their 
own poets, who said, “For we are also the off- 
spring of God.” We have a corrupt nature, as 
the law of heredity too clearly proves; but that 
doctrine should be relieved by the other statement, 
that there is in each and all of us a nature 
spiritual and divine. A single sentence of Pascal’s 
puts the whole truth regarding man: “ There are 
two natures in us, one good, the other bad.” It is 
the teaching of Paul: “ That which I do, I allow 
not; for what I would, that I do not; but what 
I hate, that do I.” The admission of a twofold 
nature in man runs through all literature. Not to 
multiply quotations, let me appeal directly to your 
own experience. Who does not know the contest 
as we'l as the self-accusation that forces out of him 


LHELAW OF HEREDITY. 105 


the confession: ‘There is another man within me, 
that’s angry with me, rebukes, commands, and 
dastards me”? It is the man of God’s creation, 
the better nature whose lineage is from above, and 
shows itself, at the opening of life, in dreams of 
purity, love, and heaven. We are children of the 
flesh, and the flesh is weak; but we have also an 
origin from God, who is the Father of our spirits. 
The higher message which comes to us in the 
words of Elihu, and above all in the doctrine and 
life of Jesus is this: “The Spirit of God has made 
us, and the breath of the Almighty is our life.” 
God is a Spirit, and man is a spirit too. Therefore 
the spirit is the precious part of us. Man zs a 
spirit, and has a body frail and perishing, to be 
valued only for the protection and education which 
the spirit may gain by it. Now, by this fresh 
concept of God and clear revelation of man, Christ 
seeks our regenerated life, when He says, “ How 
much better is a man than a sheep!” He pene- 
trates our nature to its core, speaks of its heavenly 
origin, and lays bare its unspeakable possibilities, 
as the offspring of the eternal Father, and capable 
of vast moral issues, as the heir of immortality, 
and the object of infinite love. It is here that 
Christ’s gospel wins, for it says to us: “ You are 


106 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


a part of God, your nature has no meaning but 
in a discovery of this truth. You have no place 
in this world but in relation to Him. The full 
relationship can only be realised by receiving 
Christ. ‘To as many as receive Him, to them 
gives He power to become the sons of God.’” 
Science, with its law of heredity, sends the weak- 
est to the wall; but Jesus speaks to them with 
pity and hope, and begins in them His everlast- 
ing redemption. He does so by assuring them 
that the movements of a better nature within 
are voices of the Spirit of God yet unhushed by 
sin, traces of a heavenly origin yet unobliterated 
by the wastes and woes of an evil life. 

Jt is true that the law of heredity has brought 
a sad entail of evil upon us, not only as indi- 
viduals but as members of the human race. We 
are all involved in the first man’s transgression ; we 
inherit depravity, helplessness, condemnation, and 
death, as being under a law of hereditary evil. 
“By one man’s disobedience many were made 


2) 


sinners That source of inheritance we all know; 
but if in Adam there descends to us a dire entail 
of evil, wrath, and death, in Christ we have a be- 
queathment of grace, justification, and life. ‘The 


sin of Adam is more than outweighed in its influ- 


THEOLAW OF HEREDITY. 107 


ence over us by the righteousness of Jesus Christ. 
The new pulse of life from the cross is mightier 
than the tide of tainted life that comes to us from 
the foot of the forbidden tree. The transfusion of 
grace prevails over that of corruption. Where 
sin abounds, grace does much more abound.” * 

Hereditary taints of character, and the dis- 
abilities of original sin which make self-effort and 
self-conquest so hopeless, can only be overcome by 
the new vital forces which descend to us from the 
second and stronger Head of the race. “ The first 
Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was 
made a quickening spirit.” He unites Himself to 
us by His Spirit, and thus quickens possibilities of 
better moral life in our nature, which transmitted 
evil may suppress but cannot extinguish, because 
our nature originally transcends the first Adam, 
and comes from God. The work of the second 
Adam knits anew the ties which relate us to God, 
restores the balance of moral forces disturbed by the 
inheritance of evil, reinforces us with the strength 
of holiness, and turns the great law of heredity to 
secure for us “ the power of an endless life.” 

Have you hitherto shut your ears to this higher 


1 “Heredity and its Evangelical Analogies ;” The Expositor, 
October 1889. 


108 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


message? Do so no more, but listen to the 
witnesses in your own nature of your divine 
descent, as well as in the gospel of Christ. The 
Spirit of God has made you, and the breath of the 
Almighty is your life. Realise this truth, and it 
will be the day of your adoption. If you would 
see the Father hastening to meet you, learn first 
to say within yourself, “I will arise and go to 
my Father.” He runs to meet your separation 
and want; O run to meet His love. He waits till 
you are dissatisfied with the swine husks, till you 
are weary of the riotous living, and then He flies 
to greet you with the ring and the robe. Realise 
this your high lineage, and live by it from day to 
day. “The Spirit of God entered into me, and 
set me on my feet,’ says the prophet. Yes; the 
Spirit of God causes us to stand upright by im- 
pressing us with the dignity of our high pedigree, 
and sets us on our feet by making us most 
conscious of our own responsibility, most alive to 
our own deathless greatness. There is nothing 
to be proud of in any ancestry which is not i us. 
If our lineage is of any value, that which descends 
to us must be not something dead and gone, not 
a well-preserved mummy, but something that lives 
in us and attests itself by present qualities. Have 


THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 109 


we within ourselves the qualities that are begotten 
by the breath of the Almighty? Can we point to 
aught in our being that makes us kindred with 
God in holy affections and like purposes? Have 
we moments of faith and aspiration, love and 
prayer? Then the Spirit of God is making us 
new creatures, and the breath of the Almighty is 
expanding and filling our life. 

Some practical application of the subject may be 
made by reading our duty in the light of this law 
of heredity. 

There is a light of solemn interest for parents. 

They transmit peculiarities of thought and habit 
to their offspring, even from before birth, and still 
more as the result of early home training. Our 
lives, though our own, are something of the lives 
of all those that have taken care of us, as theirs 
were of the lives that took care of them, and as 
the lives of whole generations were of those of 
preceding eras. We are the receptacle of a history 
which has come down to us through thousands of 
years. We cannot tell what part came to us, and 
what part was developed in us; but it is there. 
There may be a long distance between the seed 
and the harvest, but the harvest is the child of 
the seed. And parents are the sowers of seed, as 


110 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE-- 


none else can be. The things we do for the 
interior life of a child are lost from sight and 
forgotten; but they remain as active forces along 
with others, and go on acting clear down to the 
very end of the child’s life. It is dangerous to 
infuse malign influences into a child’s life, but 
glorious to introduce elements of truth, purity, 
and love; to be in a true sense, an organ of the 
Spirit of God to the child. Those elements may 
seem to vanish for a score of years ; they are latent. 
A thousand times they come back. In the last 
years of life, when he has wrestled with adversity 
and conquered, it will be found that, after all, the 
threads that were put in by a mother’s love and 
a father’s prayers have not broken, and the fabric 
retains them to the very end. Therefore, fathers, 
‘Provoke not your children to wrath, but bring 
them up in the nurture and admonition of the 
Lord.” Continue the good old custom of family 
worship, for that is a daily recognition at home of 
the truth that the Spirit of God has made us, and 
the breath of the Almighty is our life. 

There is a light of tender interest for children. 

Evil can be transmitted, and so can good. It is 
dreadful to be afflicted with any hereditary weak- 


ness, whether of mind or morals. Children who 


THILAW OF HEREDITY. III 


inherit the craving for drink have more temptation 
to follow, and less power to avoid, the course of 
their parents, than the children of the temperate. 
When children are born with appetites fatally 
strong in their nature, they are sorely handicapped 
in the struggle to be virtuous. As they grow up, 
the appetite is apt to grow with them, and speedily 
becomes a master, and the master a tyrant. One 
who went through that experience tells that for 
eight-and-twenty years the soul within him had 
to stand, like an unsleeping sentinel, guarding the 
appetite for strong drink. To be a man at last 
under such a disadvantage, not to say a saint, is 
as great a triumph of virtue as it is a fine trophy 
of grace. I have read of a woman, a prisoner in 
Glasgow gaol, to whom fifty thieves and dissolute 
women owed their descent. That is not a pedigree 
which any one would choose to have. 

Every one is proud of a good ancestry, of an 
ancestry whose characteristic 1s goodness. Our 
life is always the breath of the spirit that made 
us; the traits of the fathers reappear in the 
children. If our fathers and mothers have left 
us the legacy of a true and good life, then how 
_ much we owe them, and how tenderly they remind 
us that we should carry forward the traditions of 


Bh 2- THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


their prayers and examples to yet higher levels! 
One often sees the law made luminous—“ Instead 
of the fathers, the children ;” and it is a beautiful 
sight. Here is a man who lives in his town like 
an inspiration for honesty, purity, and charity, in 
whose life burns still the fire of another strong 
true man who was his father, and who passed out 
of men’s sight a score of years ago. Men call the 
father dead, but he is no more dead than the torch 
has gone out which lighted the beacon blazing on 
the hill. It is blessed to come of a good stock. 
Thrice happy is the church or town whose sons 
perpetuate memories of such ancestral worth ! 

There is a light of hopeful interest for all who 
realise their divine descent. 

The premonition of our future is the voice of our 
past ; the promise of our destiny is the echo of our 
origin. If we have moments on the Mount, we 
shall get glimpses of the Promised Land. Hours 
of communion in this life are a prophecy of perfect 
communion in the life to come. We cannot rise 
too high for our source. “ Like trailing clouds of 
elory,” sings the poet Wordsworth, in his ‘‘ Ode to 
Immortality,” we come from God our home, and we 
shall go to God because we have come from Him. 


The hope of everlastingness also springs from 


THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 113 


the law of heredity. The good which benefactors 
have transmitted to us shall be recognised and 
rejoiced over together in a higher world. Good 
thoughts that have come to us from parents, or 
which we have got from teachers like Augustine, 
Thomas & Kempis, and Jeremy Taylor, are legacies 
for which we shall yet one day have an opportunity 
to thank the testators. One man sows, another 
reaps, and they shall rejoice together. The land of 
rejoicing is above and beyond. There meet those 
who were helpers of each other on earth, and their 
works do follow them. In the great invisible to 
which we go, we shall find ten thousand strings 
which we have made musical, and they shall vibrate 
through the whole universe for ever. Let us then 
attune our hearts and lives to the exceeding great- 
ness of God’s love towards us, “in that, while we 
were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” 


V. 


THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE—THE 
LAW OF VARIATION. 


No special theory of evolution yet advanced can 
be said to be free from criticism, or to be fully 
established, though agreement is nearly universal 
that some form of evolution must be accepted as 
accounting for the course of nature. Anything 
like complete proof of this doctrine of science can- 
not be adduced, and anything like direct experi- 
mental proof, we may venture to say, will never be 
found; but yet a kind of proof, felt to be most 
convincing, continues to be met with in every 
department of human inquiry. Evolution of some 
kind, and according to some law, is a doctrine recog- 
nised almost everywhere by those who have learned 
to observe and think. And the principle is not 
confined to the forms of plant and animal, for it is 
believed to be equally active in the inorganic world, 
and in the world of human thought and action. 


Most of our scientists are agreed that life has arisen 
114 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 115 


from preceding life, and that this process has gone 
on through long ages under the operation of two 
laws—the laws of descent and variation. Every 
one has observed that like begets like, that forms 
of structure, features of expression, and aptitudes 
of different kinds, are transmitted from generation 
to generation. It is also patent to every observer 
that nature shows a disposition to leave the beaten 
path ; that life, while keeping strictly within the 
line of descent, has a tendency to depart from it. 
This is what men of science call the Law of Varia- 
tion. We cannot gainsay the fact that individual 
differs from individual, and that no two individuals 
are perfectly alike. It is admitted on all hands 
that descent and variation are processes at work, 
and that every new unveiling of nature shows 
these processes to play a great part amid the inter- 
actions of energies that make up our world. The 
law of descent runs deep into the plan of life, and 
none know this so well as they who have seen how 
any change from the line of descent tends to revert; 
and yet the further investigation goes, it must be 
allowed that the production of forms of variation is 
well nigh endless. So far men are generally at 
one; but when we ask how it is that offspring is 
both so like, and yet so unlike, parents, the 


116 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


attempts to explain it are numerous and conflicting. 
For we must remember, in dealing with such a 
subject, how endlessly complex is the organic world, 
how little we know of the causes and modes of 
variation, of the influences that modify the action 
of selection. No answer can be held as satisfactory 
which finds this process of differences to be an 
affair of sport, such as “extraordinary births,” a 
thing of chance or accident. Ifa breeder needs all 
his skill, contrivance, and perseverance to produce 
a variety, and if, with all, he cannot turn out a 
new species, surely skill beyond conception must 
have presided over an accumulation of differences 
that has resulted in the production of such an 
organism as man. Accidental modification cannot 
explain it; there must have been an organising 
cause. | 

I. The Law of Variation in the natural world. 

The apostle points to a manifest illustration of 
this law, in what our eyes see above our heads: 
‘There is one glory of the sun, and another glory 
of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one 
star differeth from another star in glory.” Since 
the telescope has been applied to the investigation 
of the heavens, those differences have been made 
still more manifest. The milky way has been 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. L197 


resolved into countless myriads of stars; crowds of 
double and triple stars have been discovered ; 
planets of varying size and lustre sweep at varying 
orbits round the sun. Imagination fails to con- 
ceive what strangly diversified conditions of life 
exist in those remote spheres. Voltaire points one 
of his severest gibes at human nature in the fable 
which transfers an inhabitant of one of the larger 
planets to our earth, and sets him to talking with 
one of our race, who is greatly elated at the 
thought of his immense knowledge. ‘‘ We have only 
sixty senses,” erumbles this visitor from Saturn, 
and so he quite puts to confusion the tiny inhabit- 
ant of earth, who is forced to confess that he has only 
five. The fable suggests what teeming varieties 
of evolution may people the spaces of heaven. 

The apostle still further illustrates the law of 
variation by pointing out differences of organic life 
on earth: ‘All flesh is not the same flesh; but 
there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of 
beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.” 
What the apostle noted here as a fact in the 
natural world, and made use of to illustrate what 
shall hold in the world of resurrection, has been 
lifted into a great law to account for the progress 
of life on our globe. The Variation of Plants and 


118 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


Animals under Domestication, is the title of one 
of Darwin’s principal works, and it aims at giving 
us a clue to the method or law of organic advance 
from the time that life first appeared on the earth. 
It has been a course of evolution from lower to 
higher forms till the plan of life reaches its apex 
and crown in the fair human form. Organic beings 
possess an inherent tendency to vary. Life, as we 
now know, is a most plastic element, and moves 
towards wonderful changes. If this were not so, 
man could do nothing to produce varieties, but we 
know how much he can do in this direction with 
cultivated plants and domesticated animals. When 
he grows them in different soils, scarcely a plant can 
be named, though cultivated in the crudest manner, 
which has not given birth to several varieties. 

And so among the advancing forms of living 
nature that have arisen during the many changes 
through which our earth has gone, a law of varia- 
tion has ever been at work to prevent a mere 
repetition of the past, and so secure that 


“No compound of this earthly ball 
Be like another all in all.” 


When beneficial variations arise, the struggle for 
existence determines that those variations, how- 
ever slight, which are favourable, shall be selected 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 119 


or preserved. The preservation has been called 
Natural Selection by Darwin, or the Survival of 
the Fittest by Herbert Spencer. It is the common 
and widely ranging or dominant species which 
most frequently vary, and include the largest 
number of flourishing varieties. When variations 
that are advantageous have occurred, they become 
inherited ; and so the law of heredity comes in to 
preserve them. 

That it is a law of nature for plants and 
animals thus to vary and differ from one another, 
take a few proofs. When an organism varies in 
any manner, it will vary again in the same mannev. 
If a gardener observes one or two additional petals 
in a flower, he feels confident that in a few genera- 
tions he will be able to raise a double flower, 
crowded with petals. A farmer experienced in 
raising new kinds of wheat knows that a good 
variety may safely be regarded as the forerunner 
of a better one. Observe how minutely the 
tendency to differ exists. It is told of a gardener 
that he could distinguish a hundred and fifty kinds 
of camellia, and an old Dutch florist kept above 
twelve hundred varieties of the hyacinth, and knew 
each variety by the bulb alone. Several breeds 
of dogs are respectively characterised by different 


120 THE GOSPEL, AND SCIENCE 


instincts. Among the varieties which have spon- 
taneously arisen from time to time, we have the 
fleetness of the greyhound, the brute strength of 
the mastiff, the fine scent of the pointer, and the 
sagacity of the shepherd’s dog. Yet all these 
varieties must have originally belonged to the same 
stock, Linnaeus says that the Laplanders, by long 
practice, know and give a name to each reindeer, 
and that he could no more distinguish one from 
another than he could distinguish ants on an ant- 
hill. But ask eminent naturalists, and they will 
tell you that each ant knows its fellows of the 
same community. No two individuals in plant or 
animal are identically the same. No two germs or 
seeds, not even two leaves on the same tree, are 
precisely alike. All wild animals recognise each 
other, which shows there must be some difference 
between them. When the eye is well trained, 
the shepherd knows each sheep, and man is able to 
distinguish a fellowman out of millions on millions 
of other men. Now, this brings us to consider— 
Il, The Law of Variation in the spiritual world. 
Variability may be said to be as much an 
aboriginal law as growth or inheritance. Some 
think that variation and heredity are equal and 


antagonistic principles. By the great teachers of 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 121 


science they are regarded as the two chief factors 
in the development of organic nature. When we 
ask, however, why organic beings tend to vary, 
those teachers give somewhat obscure and unsatis- 
factory replies. Darwin seems to think that 
variation is accidental, depending on the nature 
of changed conditions, in a word on environment, 
yet he is constrained to admit that it depends to 
a far greater degree on the nature or constitution 
of the organism. Others speak of it as an 
“internal tendency,” but that phrase explains 
nothing. Some, like Huxley, say that it 1s 
caused by the active efforts of animals in upward 
directions ; they introduce the theory of spasmodic 
rise (nisus) as an aid to gradual process, which 
differs little from the idea of creation. All these 
guesses only show that an explanation of life must 
be sought in a region which science cannot explore, 
unless led into it by the hand of faith and religion. 
The law of variation takes us to the borders of the 
spiritual world; nay, it 1s a method or process 
working upon nature from the spiritual world. 
We speak of natural law in the spiritual world, 
that is, as reaching up into, and at work in, the 
spiritual world; but the truth rather seems to be 
that natural law is just the spiritual world, not 


122 LAE COSPELVAND SCENE EE 


only above nature, but behind it, and under it, 
and in it. This innate tendency to vary is the 
power of God helping the organism to rise, 
‘always developing nature to a capacity to be 
receptive of higher powers. Under the tension 
of the divine energy in it, it always seems to be 
‘stirring its bounds to overpass’— always aspiring 
to return to the spiritual whence it came.” In 
man the highest evolutionary stage of the physical 
has been reached, and the spiritual begins. The 
effort of nature seems to have been to produce a 
person, and having done this, to rest from its 
labours. As the highest product and last out- 
come of nature, man is a person—one who has 
intellect, feeling, and will, who has the attributes 
of self-consciousness, freedom, and moral obligation, 
who knows himself distinct from creation, though 
bound to it by a thousand ties, yet so separate 
from it that he can rise above it and look beyond 
it. If there is to be further evolution, it will not 
be material but spiritual, because man is the 
image of God, as near and like to God as a created 
being can be. If an end of physical variation has 
been reached, yet the law works in that true 
spiritual world to which man has been elevated 
by his endowments of thought and will. 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 123 


As the end and at the head of creation, man has 
in himself the whole history of creation: the entire 
past is summed up in him, and the whole process 
of evolving nature is repeated in him once more as 
a free moral agent. Heredity preserves and strives 
to fix the past, while the moral within him, and 
the spiritual environment made for him, stimulate 
him to rise into that divine life of which he has 
become conscious. When we come to man, we 
find the principle of variation in full play. No 
two faces are exactly alike; no two minds are 
precisely similar. Nature signally endows men 
with special faculties. One man is fitted to excel 
in some one direction, and another in another; 
and so the law works indefinitely. We must 
admit the principle of speciality in human nature, 
and understand that healthful development consists 
in the free activity of each individual, according to 
his special gifts and capacities, directed in such a 
way as to respect and promote the healthful 
activity of society in general. The tendency of 
religion, of the new life in Christ, is to widen 
immensely the range of this law of variation. In 
the highest hfe of man the law has its utmost 
freedom and scopefulness. Each man’s true and 
proper personality is not only preserved but is 


124 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


best secured in the Christian life; it is to be 
cultivated in the sphere of redeeming and regene- 
rating love. For grace does not obliterate or set 
aside, but take up and transfigure the characteristic 
elements of our nature. It may be said that the 
fact of each man’s separate individuality is the one 
thing which the Spirit of God seeks to awake, 
educe, and glorify. Mark the infinite depth and 
richness of the new life which Christ hath brought 
into the world, manifesting itself as it does with an 
endless variety of forms in the lives of men. As 
the Christian is the highest type of man, it is 
for him to develop most fully this tendency to 
individuation, which Coleridge calls the true idea 
of life. 

Religion is the consciousness of individual union 
with God in Christ-; it is the conviction of 
personal life which has in it the presentiment that 
“every one of us shall give account of himself 
unto God.” The aim of Christ in His gospel is to 
secure and perfect the originality of each man, to 
elicit and strengthen his distinct gifts. “To every 
one of us is given grace according to the measure 
of the gift of Christ.” Every peculiarity of gift or 
grace, of talent or taste, is to be preserved and 


developed and exercised. The distinctive person- 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 125 


ality ought, therefore, to be unfolded in a new 
fresh way, and into a fresh new life. The Christian 
being the highest type of man, it is manifest that 
he should exhibit a richer diversity of life, accord- 
ing to the law that variation differentiates as the 
forms of life ascend. Full scope should be given 
to the various powers of our nature ; characteristic 
differences should be acted out ; every man should 
dare to be original. It has been too much the 
fault of theology and religion to overlook or forget 
the free course of variation in the development of 
character. They have been a kind of Procrustes’ 
bed on which to crush and mutilate, instead of 
helping to educe and strengthen the powers of 
human nature. We need the scopefulness of 
individuality to be sacredly guarded, for its 
slightest forfeiture trenches on the fulness and 
freeness of life in Christ. That life, when 
unimpeded, casts itself up into new and number- 
less varieties of mind and action. It bids you 
think for yourselves, and take none of your 
knowledge, especially in divine things, at second 
hand. It bids you speak as of yourselves, and put 
the ring of reality into your speech, so that all 
men hearing you shall say, “Here is something 
more than an echo, here is an original voice. Here 


126 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


is something more than sounding brass, here is 
downright sincerity.” It bids you act for your- 
selves, and lead a simple, unconventional life, in 
which you shall make it appear that fashion, 
custom, policy, are nothing to you in comparison 
with purity of motive and integrity of conduct. 

Such individuality becomes a thing of power. 
A certain solidity of merit, that has nothing to 
do with by-ends, belongs to it; men feel its right, 
and do it homage. They who possess it are the 
men who score their mark deep into society ; they 
are the men who redeem it from a dull, dead 
uniformity. In this principle we find the sacred- 
ness of the rights of conscience. Our British 
liberty—is it not the offspring of this natural 
prerogative? Our Protestantism —is it not the 
assertion of individuality? Our Nonconformity— 
is it not the maintenance of immovable conviction 
in the face of established privilege 2 

This sacredness of the individual man, this claim 
to be himself, we owe to the grace of God and the 
gospel of Christ. ) 

The grace of God is like the sunshine which 
floods the universe, yet mirrors itself in a 
thousand various forms. The love of Christ 
passes knowledge, but it seeks to be reflected 


ee = fe | " 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 127 


in an infinite diversity of human souls. A man 
will never be himself until he has found Christ, 
and got Him to set free the spirit that is in us; 
he will never become a power until God_ has 
become all in him; he will never really live till 
he has begun to live in Him. Let us come to 
Christ as we are, just with the individuality that 
is our own, and He will redeem it from evil and 
crown it with His love. To be as we are, as God 
has made us, and Christ redeems us, and the Spirit 
new creates us,—that is the whole of the Christian 
life. Let us give full scope to our original God- 
given powers; dare to be ourselves out and out; 
think, speak, and act as of ourselves, with this one 
proviso, that Christ be to us and in us, the Way, 
the Truth, and the Life. So will our individuality 
be clearly defined, and become a thing of power. 
We shall be everything when Christ shall be all— 
His love constraining us. 

One or two lessons may be learned from the 
working of the law of variation both in natural 
and spiritual life. 

And first, the working of this law leads to 
mmequelity. 

Any one who ponders the subject will quickly 
perceive that inequality is the mainspring of 


128 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


Pons It is found to be the fants of the melee 
progress of life from lower to higher forms, under 
the laws of descent and variation and natural 
selection, which decree that the race shall be to 
the swift and the battle to the strong, and that 
the weak shall be swept from the field. Part of 
the working of the law is, that the higher the scope 
for development, the greater the differentiation. 
tiven two cabinet ministers and two colliers, and 
the chances are that the former will differ more 
widely from one another than the latter. The 
flora of lands where sun and soil are kind is more 
varied than in regions of rock and snow. And so 
this process of variation causes inequality of gifts 
and conditions everywhere. The cry of the 
socialist is, “Down with all inequalities; abolish 
wealth and capital ; level social distinctions ;” but 
it is all in vain. He cannot prevent or check the 
law of variability; it has wrought too long, and 
works too deep for any man, or body of men, to 
resist it. There will be capitalists and poor men 
in the world, so long as the race is to the swift 
and the battle to the strong. Equalise conditions 
more and more by all means, but never lose sight 
of the truth that the efficiency of character 1s more 
important than change of conditions. The best 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 129 


soil will not clothe thorns with grapes, nor will 
the holiest atmosphere make the bad heart good. 
The victory of resolute men over abject poverty 
and social hardship is the glory of the human past 
and the bright prophecy of its future. 

Again, the working of this law counteracts the 
working of heredity. 

To some men the thought of hereditary taints 
and vices becomes oppressive. It les upon them 
like a nightmare, and fills them with a kind of 
pessimistic despair. But no man is left to be the 
victim of the law of heredity. There is a self- 
assertion and independence in the human will 
which refutes the one-sided philosophy, that man’s 
character is made for him and not by him. Wedo 
not need to look only to those who, born in the 
obscurest position, have seized honour and power, 
but multitudes whose names are unknown have 
made circumstances playthings in their hands. 
How often do you find the sober youth come out 
of a drunken home! How often does virtue issue 
from the very den of vice, and children exhibit 
qualities the very opposite of those which their 
birth and training might have been supposed to 
produce ! 


Have you sometimes been overwhelmed by 
I 


130 THE GOSPEL AND SCIENCE— 


thinking on the sad entail of ancestors? If the 
conviction that we and all that surrounds us have 
been so largely determined by the past weighs on 
us with tyrannous power, the thought that we in 
our turn are shaping the destinies of future genera- 
tions should become a motive of almost irresistible 
force, compelling us to high resolve and dutiful 
action. | 

Again, the working of this law affords encourage- 
ment to strenuous effort. 

In the formation of a moral purpose, as of a 
drunkard to abstain from liquor, something more 
is needed. Everything may predispose to indulg- 
ence. The inveterate habit, both in mind and 
frame, may be dragging its victim downwards ; 
but just as science asserts that the striving of the 
creature has led to organic change, and to a higher 
coigne of vantage in the battle of life, through the 
working of some power behind nature, so in like 
manner the struggle upwards of the human will is 
sure to meet with response from Him who is “able 
to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask 
or think, according to the power that worketh in 
us.” We need the whole world to stand on, and 
all truth to support us; and we have it here. 


Nature joins with Scripture to assure us that grace 


THE LAW OF VARIATION. 131 


to help in time of need will not be withheld. Let 
the appetites and passions of the beast that are in 
us be kept down by our striving after the spiritual 
nature: let us not sink backward into brute 
conditions, but rise into the divine life that opens 
a path from lower to higher being, and paves the 
way between this world and the next. 

_ Lastly, the working of this law shapes our 
future destiny. 

When the apostle says that one star differs from 
another star in glory, he uses the illustration to 
set forth new adaptations and varieties in the life 
of a pure and redeemed and glorified humanity. 
“There are celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial ; 
there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual 
body.” Life m heaven, life in the resurrection, does 
not merge the individuality of any one, whether 
in soul or body. The personal life will not be 
absorbed and overshadowed in the life of the 
Infinite One. If our personality is to melt into the 
being of God, then surely God will not be our life 
but our annihilation. He can say no longer of us, 
‘Because I live, ye shall live also.” That would 
be death indeed. God’s universal life will not 
destroy the old varieties of being, but pulsate 
through them in ever augmenting degrees of bliss. 


132 THE CQSPEL AND: SCIENCE. 


We sometimes sing of losing ourselves in the ocean 
of His love, but this is only poetically true. Love 
is an ocean where no man _ permanently loses 
himself, but regains himself in richer, nobler form. 
God’s glory will only give us back our life, that we 
may keep it unto life eternal. 

Let us not misread the destiny of our being. 
Though God is to be all, yet He is to be all 2 all. 
Separate being is still being preserved. Whatever 
possibilities of life, Christian believer, stretch on 
before thee in the eternal future, thou shalt be 
thyself, the same, differing from every other in 
glory, though advancing in glory for ever and 


ever. 


VI. 
THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


THE system of thought known by the name of 
Positivism, owes its existence to an eminent 
French philosopher, Auguste Comte. He was 
born in 1797, and at an early age, like Bacon and 
Locke, the age of fourteen, when he was at college, 
the reforming spirit began to move him, and he 
felt the need of applying the scientific method to 
the resolution of vital and social problems. He 
taught mathematics both in private and at one of 
the public schools in Paris, while he devoted his 
leisure to scientific study and the slow develop- 
ment of his philosophy. It was his lot, as it is 
the lot generally of original and honest minds, to 
be persecuted, and the story of his persecutions 
is told in the sixth volume of his chief work, the 
Course of Positwe Philosophy. At the age of 
fifty-seven he was thrown upon the world, and had 


no other help than what a few admirers collected 
133 


134 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


for him. In his forty-fifth year he came under the 
influence of a remarkable woman, a new influence 
which for one blissful year penetrated him like 
sunshine, and changed his life. “He learned to 
appreciate the abiding and universal influence of 
the affections. He gained a new glimpse into 
man’s destiny. He aspired to become the founder 
of a new religion, the Religion of Humanity.” The 
Polity of Comte was the outcome-of that influence. 
He grew more and more religious both in temper 
and habit, though in a sense not very intelligible 
to the popular mind, but he made his only reading 
for years The Divine Comedy and The Inutation 
of Christ. Night and morning he spent an hour 
in prayer, and passed one afternoon of every week 
‘n meditation in church, and in silent communion 
with his loved and lost, “with the full assurance 
that happiness, like duty, is to be found only in the 
more perfect surrender of self to the great Being, 
‘1 whom the universal order is transfigured, and 
the wise will strive ever to devote their lives more 
truly to its service. Man’s prudence and energy, 
with all their resources, only bring out more fully 
man’s dependence ; so that they force him to seek 
outside of himself the sole foundations by which 
he can give stability to his life.” Behind this 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISH. 


135 


form of sound words Comte places a ereat 
rival to Christianity, a strange substitute for God. 
Positivism, or the Religion of Humanity, is one of 
the best-known substitutes for the gospel of Christ. 

The writings of Comte are voluminous and 
elaborate. Sir Fitzjames Stephen declared once 
that life was too short to read Comte. Sir 
William Hamilton expressed, forty years ago, his 
surprise that the, French thinker should be taken 
up in this country when being given up in his 
own; but the truth is that his disciples have 
increased in both countries, and his system of 
thought has gained more or less the adhesion of 
eminent men everywhere. Ardent disciples, like 
the late Professor Clifford and Cotter Morrison, 
assign him a place among the foremost thinkers of 
the race, and claim for him the distinction of being 
the founder of a new religion, and of the modern 
science of Sociology.> Leaders of thought, lke 
George Lewes and John Stuart Mill, have paid him 
the honour of translating and expounding his works. 
As Hegel says, ‘It is only a great man that 
condemns us to the task of explaining him.” The 
same kind of homage has been rendered by 
Professor Edward Caird in his book on The Social 
Philosophy and Religion of Comte. Herbert 


136 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


Spencer is his great antagonist, and yet he says 
of Comte: “True or unture, his system as a whole 
has doubtless produced important and salutary 
revolutions of thought in many minds, and will 
doubtless do so in many more. . . . The presenta- 
tion of scientific knowledge and method as a 
whole, whether rightly or wrongly co-ordinated, 
cannot have failed greatly to widen the conception 
of most of his readers. And he has done special 
service by familiarizing men with the idea of a 
social science based on other sciences.” It is 
admitted by all who have studied Comte, that he 
has done more than any other thinker towards 
a classification of the sciences, towards an organi- 
sation of the definitely established knowledge 
of science into a coherent body of doctrine, and 
towards a better reconstruction of society. It is 
admitted by all that the faculties which form the 
chief distinction of human nature—the faculties of 
abstraction and construction—were imperial in the 
working of his mind. He had an organising 
genius like that of Aquinas, who conceived of 
theology as the master-science of life, or like that 
of Bacon, who was the first to form that vast idea 
of philosophy as an organic whole to be verified by 
the methods of science. And his work of recon- 


PAE GOSPEL-AND POSTTIVISM. 137 


struction in philosophy and science and _ social 
order is so comprehensive, that the builders of 
many methods will be indebted to him for a 
large measure of their material. 

At present, however, we are mainly concerned 
with positivism in its religious, moral, and social 
bearings, and shall pass into the heart of the 
system by noticing briefly what Comte calls the 
“law of the three stages,’ and what he considers 
to be the fundamental law of human evolution. 
History, he maintains, reveals three distinct stages, 
the theological or supernatural, the metaphysical, 
and the positive. He regards the theological as the 
earliest or crudest, and the positive as the last and 
fullest explanation of God, man, and the universe. 
In the theological stage man reads all phenomena 
as originated by personal wills or agents, and 
ascribes to them his own attributes. Here, again, 
three successive stages are to be noted: fetishism, 
in which every phenomenon is endowed with its 
own will; polytheism, in which groups of pheno- 
mena are controlled by superior powers; and 
monotheism, which is conceived when the idea of 
a universe has been formed, and a personal will is 
thought to be the first cause of all things. Such, 
Comte teaches, is the course of the mind in its 


138 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


first stage. The metaphysical, or second stage, 
explains phenomena by looking beyond them to 
some entity or principle, whose modes of action 
were regarded as invariable. Any intervention of 
external beings or gods was denied, and inherent 
essences and powers were conceived as dominating 
the constant succession of things. In this inter- 
mediate phase of critical thought it becomes 
apparent that such entities are pure abstractions, 
the negative character of which would show itself 
to closer inquiry. They were simply the negation 
of the gods whose places they took—abstract 
spectres occupying the field when the play of 
superhuman will had been dethroned. ‘The 
recognition of invariableness in phenomena was, 
however, the germ of science in this second stage ; 
it was an imperfect scientific inquiry, conducted by 
the aid of the subjective method bequeathed from 
the theological stage. It created abstractions 
which had no positive content of their own, yet 
seemed to be positive principles taking the place 
of the beliefs they discarded. The essences of the 
schoolmen were the product of this speculative 
inquiry ; the same method of explanation has gone 
on into every department of human knowledge. 
The last substantial abstraction, therefore, which 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 139 


is put in the place of divine powers is nature. 
And nature is only a name for the general course 
of things, though it is regarded by metaphysics as 
existing apart from and controlling them. The 
third or final stage, in reference to which, accord- 
ing to Comte, the other two are transitory, is the 
positive state, which adheres simply to constancies 
of succession and co-existence, treats them as the 
laws of nature, and recognises them alone as the 
sum-total of human inquiry. Beyond the laws 
which regulate phenomena, it is idle to penetrate. 
According to this formula, human _ intelligence 
necessarily passes in its growth through three 
stages, and men’s conceptions of the world begin 
by being theological and end by being positive. 
Phenomena are at first interpreted by men in the 
terms of their own consciousness, next by the 
substitution of abstract figments for a supernatural 
agent, and then finally by attention solely to the 
phenomena themselves. These are reduced to 
laws. Search after causes is abjured, pretension to 
absolute knowledge is set aside, and the discovery 
of laws is declared to be the only object of research. 
Here, then, let us note the first great feature of 
positivism. As a general scheme of thought, on 
its negative side, it refuses all belief in anything 


140 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


beyond phenomena, and the laws connected with 
them; it holds an attitude of hostility to the 
supernatural; it seeks to drive theology and 
metaphysics from the whole sphere of knowledge, 
and concentrate human thought within the limits 
of science. The long attempt of reason to 
penetrate the absolute must be given up as an idle 
and unprofitable task. 

Now, in answer to all this we simply say that 
theology and metaphysics refuse to be expelled. 
Banish them as you will, they are sure to return. 
It can be shown that the positive method 
involves a metaphysic, and ends in a theology. 
The three phases of human progress are funda- 
mental elements of the mind, permanent factors 
of human intelligence. All knowledge must be 
theological, metaphysical, and positive. As to 
this dogmatic nescience of positivism, with regard 
to the how and why of things, “you may,’ 
said Guizot, “interrogate the human race in all 
time and in all places, in all states of society and 
in all grades of civilisation, and you will find men 
everywhere and always believing spontaneously in 
facts and causes beyond the sensible world, beyond 
this ever-operating system called Nature.” It isa 
proof of the greatness of man’s mind that he must 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 141 


transcend the limits of creation. He has a sense 
of the Infinite, which can never cease to assert 
itself imperiously. Furthermore, every triumph of 
genius or goodness in the cause of humanity has 
' been won by those whose life was rooted in a 
higher faith than that of the positivist. “It is the 
men who wait in the antechamber with a sense 
of the great Presence in which they shall render 
their account and receive their new commission, by 
whom all great and glorious things have been done 
for the world, and the highest possibility of the 
humblest cottage life is conditioned by the same 
faith.” On such grounds we combat the opposition 
of Comte and his disciples to the supernatural. 
Although his “law of the three stages” contains 
much truth, another school of thought, powerful 
in this country and America, claims a different 
ending to this progress. If positivism takes no 
account of anything beyond the immediate content 
of observed facts, the agnostic school recognise the 
absolute and infinite power which is manifested 
in phenomena, and charge positivism, in Spencer’s 
words, with ‘an avowed ignoring of cause alto- 
gether.” Comte’s positive stage is therefore set 
aside, and one in which first cause is avowed takes 
its place. It is held that men began by seeing 


142 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


volition everywhere, and must end by seeing an 
inscrutable power everywhere. 

But while the agnostic and the positivist differ 
as to the final term, they differ still more in their 
attitude towards religion. If religion certainly is 
the unknowable, -and treats of the unknowable 
only, it is certain that there would soon be no 
religion, and men would treat it as a thing which 
they had outgrown. And such is, on the whole, 
the agnostic position. And if the positivist takes 
up a still more negative attitude towards the un- 
knowable, what meaning, it may be asked, can the 
term religion have for him, and what has he to do 
_with it? The strange paradox is, that the con- 
ditions and parts of religion have never been so 
thoroughly conceived before, by theologian or by 
philosopher, ancient or modern, as by the founder 
of this new gospel, though he is less reluctant to 
| deny than to affirm the existence of a personal God. 
Comte has examined, with marvellous completeness, 
the scope, functions, and elements of religion, and 
has organised, with still more marvellous genius of 
construction, the religion he proposes into a system 
of “majestic symmetry.” The fervent positivist 
does not indulge, like some leaders of thought, m 


such high-flown phrases as “the relation of man 


PIE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 143 


to the Invisible or Unknowable,” or “what the 
Immensities have to say to us,” or the “ Eternal 
Power that makes for righteousness,” or the “ great 
heaven-high Unquestionability.” 
like some of our modern divines, to escape out of 
their own skins, by renouncing the creed they 
have sworn to defend, and effacing its discipline. 
Attempts to sublimate religion into a nebulous 
theosophy, coloured by the Sermon on the Mount, 
in the interests of something more catholic, more 
full of sweetness and light, are fashionable, and 
take in a time of Protestant anarchy like the 
present. The positivist has learned from his 
master how weak a thing religion is when made 
vague and elastic, and from another Catholic 
church the necessity for a definite and systematic 
and organised religion. It must have a coherent 
scheme of doctrines, and an organised code of 
practice ; it must have what all great churches, 
what men like Calvin, Knox, Hooker, or Wesley 
understand by it, a creed, a worship, and a 
government, duly co-ordinated and fitted to temper 
the individual life, and combine men’s lives into 
an ideal social state. The conception of religion as 
the complete harmony of human life in all its 
parts, whether social or individual, is claimed as 


Nor is he anxious, 


144 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


the greatest of all the conceptions of Comte, and 
is elaborated in the Politique Positive. He says: 
“To constitute any true religious state there must 
be a concurrence of two primary elements, the 
one objective and intellectual, the other subjective 
and moral... . It is requisite that our minds 
should conceive a power without us, so superior to 
ourselves as to command the complete submission 
of our entire life... . To make submission com- 
plete, affection must unite with respect ; and this 
combination of feelings is effected spontaneously 
by the sense of gratitude. The profound respect 
inspired by the supreme power awakens also a 
mutual sentiment of benevolence in ali who join in 
devotion to the same great object. The analysis 
which I finally choose as the best to express the 
true series of parts is that which makes religion 
consist of three essential elements: doctrine, 
worship, and government. . . . The doctrine 
forms the groundwork for the worship, and the 
worship for the government.” 

It cannot be doubted that there is substantial 
truth in all this definition of religion. What, then, 
is the doctrine of the positive religion? Its creed 
is the sum of definite knowledge, the consensus of 
all science, the laws of the whole field of pheno- 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 145 
ee ee 
mena, physical and moral. In this system one 


can see that science itself is the creed, and thus 
science and religion are brought into unity. What 
is its worship? The positivist acknowledges the 
necessity for a supreme power and a controlling 
providence. Where is his God? What is the 
external power which, Comte says, should be 
possessed of superiority so irresistible as to leave 
no sort of uncertainty about it? He does not 
find the supreme being in a superhuman world, 
but in collective humanity, in the ideal human 
race, in the whole of human beings, past, present, 
and future. In place of worshipping God, the 
personal and absolute unity of life, Comte would 
substitute the worship of humanity, “the real 
author of the benefits for which thanks were 
formerly given to God,” “the only one we can 
know, and therefore the only one we can worship.” 
The religion of humanity has an elaborate worship, 
private and public. It divides the former into 
personal and domestic; the guardian angels of the 
family—the mother, wife, and daughter—are the 
three types which represent the ideal of humanity. 
Domestic piety is expressed in seven sacraments, 
—presentation, initiation, admission, destination, 


marriage, maturity, retirement, transformation, and 
K 


146 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


Saayeron CPablic worship has fort its a. a 
woman of the age of thirty with a child in her arms, 
a calendar or series of festivals in honour of all the 
great epochs and characteristics of human life, and a 
priesthood whose function is to systematise know- 
ledge and control life at every point. Such is the 
positivist conception of God, of religion, and worship. 

To begin with the last, it will be apparent that 
positivism offers to us an elaborate imitation of 
catholic and medieval Christianity. It embodies 
all the worst features of priestcraft, and restores 
authority, not as an infinite ideal, contained in a 
person whom we can love and venerate, but as an 
immutable order, expounded by science. Public 
( opinion is to be our deity. “Ye shall be as gods, 
knowing good and evil;” that old temptation is 
enthroned, on the ground that within the sphere 
of nature man is highest—nature’s choicest result 
and crown. He is all that, so far as science 
teaches, but not so far as to grasp the crown of 
deity. If positivism makes collective humanity 
its supreme being, it bids us worship that which 
had a beginning on the earth, and will likely have 
an end. It can never shut out the thought of a 
Power of which humanity is but a small and fugitive 
product, which wrought when humanity was not,and 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 147 


will continue to work when humanity has ceased to 
be. Collective humanity, take it all in all, is a poor, 
frail, fallible, and wayward production ; and when 
taken to pieces, it is a sinful and miserable creature, 
but for some Power that strives to erect it above itself. 

The worship of humanity is a retrograde step, 
from whatever point we view it. Comte’s deifica- 
tion of humanity is just as much a theological and 
metaphysical conception as any other which he 
rejects. He uses the very tools which he disdains, 
and proceeds to offer for worship that which he 
makes out of them—an abstract, incongruous, un- 
intelligent subject of his idealising faculty. He 
admits that man can rise to the objective or 
universal point of view, in relation to humanity, 
and it is equally possible and necessary with 
reference to the universe. Man regards himself 
as part of a greater whole in one case, and he is 
likewise compelled so to regard himself in the 
other. The unity of nature is a far grander 
conception than the unity of human nature; and 
once that idea is grasped, it 1s a prodigious piece 
of absurdity for Comte to say that humanity and 
not God is that universal spirit which 


“ Lives through all life, extends to all extent, 
Spreads undivided, operates unspent.” 


148 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


Here we touch the bottom of his error. For when 
we carry the idea of organic unity beyond the life 
of man to the environment in which it develops, 
we can no longer regard humanity as the chief and 
central phenomenon of the universe. However 
erand it may be, it is finite, concrete, and know- 
able. Comte condemned the study of the stars, 
and even of the planets, because it tends to dwarf 
the conception of humanity, and prove how absurd 
it is to regard it as the great being. Since our 
world is a mere speck in the awful universe of 
worlds, humanity can set up no such claim. 
Lalande once said that he had swept the heavens 
with his telescope, and found no God, as if God 
were an optical phenomenon. Comte said that 
“to minds early familiarised with true philoso- 
phical astronomy, the heavens declare no other 
clory than that of Kepler and Newton, and of all 
those who have aided in establishing her laws.” 
Mark the vicious assumption contained in such a 
statement—the capital error which he condemns 
in all theological systems, that man makes God in 
his own image, and subordinates the universe to 
himself. There is no man who stands under the 
canopy of the cathedral of immensity, and gazes 
into the starry heavens, but will, in the depths of 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 149 


his soul, echo the grand old burst of the Psalmist, 
“The heavens declare the glory of God.” 

The object of religious sentiment will ever 
continue to be that which it has ever been. There 
is One whom we do not speak of as the unknowable 
power, but as God manifest to our consciousness, 
who guides the stars, age after age, in paths that 
never err, and poises the gleaming dewdrop on its 
blade of grass, and on whom we can place unshaken 
trust yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 

The religion of humanity is too partial a 
synthesis, or harmony of life—too artificial and 
factitious and defective—to be a substitute for the 
worship of a personal God, the God of the universe, 
nigh to every one of us; yet many thinkers 
regard Comte’s idea of humanity as a noble and 
inspiring one, and fruitful of the best results in 
setting forth the organic unity of social life and 
development. If it breaks down in trying to 
abolish the old distinction between religion and 
morality, there can be no doubt that in the region 
of morality most valuable contributions have been 
made. The fact that it shifts the centre of author- 
ity from a theological to a sociological base, which 
is its capital error, points at the same time in the \ 
direction of its chief merit. Humanity is a noble 


150 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


oe eee 


conception, and we cannot raise it to a too lofty 
ideal, short of worshipping it ; all wish to see “ the 
enthusiasm of humanity,” the service of humanity, 
more thoroughly recognised, and freed from every 
element of self-interest. Comte has done this, as 
no other among the sceptred intellects of the race 
has done. He saw with the insight of genius that 
any true theory of social improvement could be 
deduced, not from abstract reasonings about human 
nature, or the observation of contemporary social 
phenomena, but from a study of them in their his- 
toric dependence. It is not a few kings and states- 
men that govern the progress of society ; what real 
influence they did possess arose from their being 
organs or instruments of great time movements. 
Comte saw clearly that at bottom the laws of 
sociology are the laws of history ; as a philosophical 
socialist, he founded his views on the phenomena of 
social evolution, and left the fields of Utopia to 
poets and dreamers. In the study of social laws, and 
their systematic co-ordination, the positive method 
considers the static and dynamic question, or what 
corresponds to order and progress of the social organ- 
ism. Social dynamics are of greatest interest in our 
day, because they embody the great and pregnant 
idea of the gradual development of humanity. 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 151 


Many of our keenest moral thinkers, besides 
Lewes and Mill, acknowledge the stimulus they 
have derived from Comte in the study of social 
problems. Another of these was James Hinton, of 
whom it has been said that he was as great i 
ethics as Newton was in physics. That is unquali- 
fied praise. But Hinton drew his inspiration from 
Comte, as we learn from his Life, where he says: 
“My obligations are absolute to the positive school. 
I am, indeed, the most advanced positivist I know. 
... My thought was not suggested from the 
spiritual side, but from the scientific... . The 
word ‘altruistic’ I borrow from Comte. Is it not 
a capital word? We wantit. It is the antithesis 
to ‘self’; self bemg=deadness ; altruistic being= 
life ; and so on.” 

The principal phases of human evolution are 
seen in individual, domestic, and social life; in the 
subjection of the first to a wise discipline, of the 
second to sympathetic instincts, and of the third 
to the luminous influences of reason. In this 
evolution of humanity it is Comte’s mission to 
expound at great length the advance from personal 
or egoistic to social and altruistic affections. The 
two extremes of different elementary tendencies 
are thus designated. He shows how man passes 


152 THE GOSPELAND POSTTTTVIOM: 


through preservative and personal instincts till the 
series is terminated by the noble group of social or 
altruistic instincts. The last are as essentially a 
part of human nature as any of the others, and 
their superiority is attested not only from a social 
point of view, but from the moral condition of the 
individual practising them. ‘“ A character governed 
by the inferior instincts alone can have neither 
stability nor fixed purposes; these qualities are 
alone attained under the empire of the impulses 
which prompt man to live for others. Every indi- 
vidual, man or animal, accustomed to live for self 
alone, is condemned to a miserable alternation of 
ionoble torpor or feverish activity. Even personal 
happiness and merit therefore depend on the pre- 
dominance of the sympathetic instincts. Progress 
towards such a moral condition should be the 
object of every living being. To lwe for others 
- is thus the natural conclusion of all positive 
morality.” According to this view of Comte’s 
system, it affirms, from the point of science and 
history, Christ’s conception, from the religious and 
intuitive side, of the absorption of self in the 
service of others as the crown of life, “the perfect 
law of liberty,” of happiness and hope. As we 
may expect from one who exalts the altruistic 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 153 


principle to such eminence, the individualistic 
point of view obtains little recognition from Comte, 
as little as it does from Christ. ‘“‘ Individuals,” he 
says, “should be regarded not as so many distinct 
beings, but as organs of the one great being.” 
We could not know ourselves as men, or live 
according to our nature, if we shut ourselves up 
within the limits of the individual. If the indi- 
vidual were isolated from society, all that marks 
him as man would be wanting. The individual, 
for whom an isolated existence is impossible, can 
only develop according to his proper nature as a 
member of the family or of society. Isolation 1s 
the word of Cain; it ig the same hard word, 
Comte will tell you, of Rousseau with his doctrine 
of “primitive rights,” and his theory of the 
“social contract,’ which reduces the state to a 
product of the individual will. But even Rousseau 
was acute enough to see that man in the social 
state alone “ceases to be a dull and limited 
animal, and becomes an intelligent being and a 
man.” Individualism was seen by Comte to be 
defective as a social power, and therefore he taught 
that “the true human point of view is not indi- 
vidual but social.” With the idea of the organic 


unity of life in his mind, he opposed the indi- 


154 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


vidualistic tendency everywhere in metaphysics 
and history—in metaphysics because it tended to 
dissolve society, as Burke puts it, “into the dust 
and powder of individuality,” and in the last three 
centuries where its pulverising effects were visible. 
The Reformation asserted man’s individual relation 
to God, and the right of private judgment, but it 
tended to isolate man from his fellows. ‘The 
immediate effect of putting personal salvation in 
the foremost place was to create an unparalleled 
selfishness, a selfishness rendering all social influ- 
ences nugatory, and thus tending to dissolve public 
lies, 

Public events in France suggested to Comte 
the same lesson. The Revolution was an explosion 
of individualism, in which the rights of man were 
asserted, and chaos ensued, because the men who 
figured in it had no new order or reconstruction of 
society to take the place of demolished feudalism. 

Now, this thought of organic evolution, in which 
altruism becomes the predominating law, is a 
magnificent thought, and commands the suffrages 
of all great thinkers in our time. It is capable of 
many developments and fruitful applications ; and 
it coalesces with the moral teaching of the gospel 


1 Polstique Positive. 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 155 


in many ways. Mere individualism is nothing but 
anarchy. More than half our social errors spring 
from placing self at the centre of all things. 
Nothing could be more flagrantly false or suicidal 
to happiness. A man who should grow up alone 
would not be a man ; in a word, he is made by and 
for fellowship, and in the family he first learns 
this, where love makes service its own reward. 
The individual cannot find his happiness in isola- 
tion, but in the life of the whole to which he 
belongs; and the lesson which Comte drew from 
the French Revolution is one we should lay to 
heart—that the individual, as such, is devoid of 
moral life, and must rise above himself and live in 
the life of humanity if he would have any depth or 
wealth of being. It is the old truth contained in 
the saying of Christ, that a man must lose his life 
in order to save it. Man only finds himself by 
living in others, and subordinating himself to a 
whole. 

Comte pressed this view so far as to regard with 
jealousy the individualistic position, and almost 
deny its right to be. Now, the sacred individu- 
ality of men must not be disregarded; it must 
be respected, and then cultivated, so as to be used 
with. nobler energy and keener responsibility in 


156 LHE GOSPEL AND. POSTTIVISH. 


the service of others. Egoism, as common sense 
shows, is a necessary factor in life; nor does 
altruism deny it. Herbert Spencer says: “If 
the dictate, ‘live for self,’ is wrong one way, the 
opposite dictate, ‘live for others, is wrong in 
another way.” The rational dictate is to “live for 
self and others.” This is quite true, but still the 
question remains, How is this to be acted on? 
If a child is taught to divide his duties into those 
for self and those for others, when it comes to 
practice, he will be forced to ask, ‘‘ How much for 
self, and how much for others?” and in the 
endeavour to serve two masters, he will become 
half selfish, and turn out selfish altogether. But 
let us look upon ourselves as means to an end, and 
then the dual principle, “ Myself and others,” will 
dissolve into the moral unity, “ Myself in and for 
others.” In this way the two tendencies of our 
nature are balanced and harmonised. 

Positivism ranks high as a system in affirming 
altruism to be its cornerstone, but it is defective 
in leaving the moral nature without any objective 
support, without any inspiring ideal, without any 
moral dynamic. It leaves it to invent its own 
idea of good, as the intellect was left before Christ. 
When the choice is put before us, of God or of 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 157 


man, of Christ or of humanity, we cannot doubt 
which is the fairer ideal or higher reality. We see 
the unity of the divine and human in one great 
living picture, in the life and death of Christ ; and 
“till that ideal is reached, it cannot be said that 
the Christian idea is exhausted, or that the place is 
vacant for a new religion.”* The idea of the 
unity of life, set forth in positivism, has been 
extended | by recent science, and a new word has 
been coined to express it. That word is “soli- 
darity,’ and it means that bond of union and 
interdependence which connects into one all spheres 
of being. We speak of the solidarity of the race, 
and mean that all depend on each other, are sensi- 
tive to the same influences, and impelled by them 
in common. We speak of the solidarity of the 
universe, and mean that one principle of life per- 
vades it. The law by which man lives is the law 
of stars and crystals, of flowers and mathematics. 
The orbs of heaven are not isolated, but shine in 
systems and galaxies. In all parts of nature there 
is community of life and development. And inter- 
dependence rises with the scale of life. Changes 
in the sun affect the movements of our planet 
and the currents of human history. Possibly the 


 Caird’s Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte. 


158 THE GOSPEL AND POSTIFVISM. 


universe is one sensitive organism, the different 
parts of which are too vast for us to perceive their 
correlations. Such a thought gives added weight 
to Comte’s idea that the whole of humanity is one 
organism, and that what constitutes the moral 
significance of history is the gradual triumph of 
altruism over egoism, “which begins by setting 
the family before the individual, which goes on to 
set the state before the family, and which must 
end in setting humanity before all.” Science thus 
unites with religion in proclaiming that “no man 
liveth unto himself.” This law of solidarity casts 
an exquisite light over all history and the universe. 
Let us see it running through all the ranges of our 
moral and social well-being. It is such teachings 
of positivism and science that are needed to give 
_ amplitude and scope to our inexhaustible gospel. 
For it is the purpose of Christ’s redeeming love 
that every man should know, in all its potency, the 
throbbings of this larger life, that every note which 
disturbs this world-harmony should cease, and that 
all things should be reconciled, whether they be 
things in heaven or things on earth. Such teach- 
ings are needed, for the tendency of the Church is 
to become a clubhouse, and they must be learned 
if the Church would reassume the authority over 


tHe GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 159 


social relations which it once wielded, if it would 
restore marriage and the family once more to the 
Christian ideal, and terminate the unhappy con- 
flicts between capital and labour which break the 
unity of Christian nations. Such teachings are 
needed, for our Christian seminaries are munching 
at the dry crusts of old theologies, or longing for 
the latest novelties of German criticism, while they 
neglect the deep undercurrents of thought running 
through the nation and seeking practical develop- 
ment on social and ethical lines never followed 
before. Rest assured that the Church that works 
for the highest and broadest interests of humanity 
is the Church of the future, and will do most for 
the reconstruction of society. | Let us learn that 
life is individual in its responsibility, and social in 
its aims. It is, as Canon Westcott says, “the 
opportunity of the individual to win for God by 
God's help that which lies within his reach; to 
accomplish on a scale, little or great, the destiny of 
humanity as it has been committed to him; to rise 
to the truth of the incarnation as the revelation of 
the purpose of the Father for the world which He 
made. . . . Every member must hold himself 
pledged to regard his endowments of character, of 
power, of place, of wealth, as a trust to be adminis- 


160 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


tered with resolute and conscious purpose for the 
good of men; pledged to spread and deepen the 
sense of one life, one interest, one hope, one end 
for all, in the household, in the factory, in the 
warehouse, in the council room; pledged to strive 
as he has opportunity to bring all things that are 
great and pure and beautiful within the reach of 
every fellow-worker ; pledged to labour so that to 
the full extent of his example and influence toil 


may be universally honoured as service to the | 


state, literature may be ennobled as the spring 
and not the substitute of thought, art (too often 
the minister of luxury) may be hallowed as the 
interpreter of the outward signs of God’s working.” 

The last peculiarity of positivism we notice is 
its attitude in relation to immortality. It accepts 
this doctrine, because it copies Christianity as a 
religion in all its main features, but it accepts the 
doctrine in a sense which is nearly tantamount to 
its denial. It teaches that we share the life of 
humanity objectively during our visible existence 
on earth, and after we are dead subjectively by 
living in the hearts and intellects of others, or in 
the deeds and influences that have promoted social 
good. This is what the positivist regards as 
sinking back into the supreme being that gave him 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 161 


birth, as the Buddhist dreams of sinking into 
Nirvana, the eternal sleep. There is the utter and 
endless annihilation of self, as in the Eastern 
religion; but Comte grasped at the thought of a 
- man’s surviving influence, and held out the promise 
of what is called posthumous immortality. We 
can understand his rejection of a personal hereafter 
when we remember his persistent disregard and 
depreciation of the “individual” throughout his 
whole system. Mere individualism, or regard for 
self in everything, does not rise above the brute, 
and like the brute might be left to perish. But 
individuality is not individualism ; and being one’s 
self, in order to live not for self, but for the 
common good, has something in its embers which 
doth live, and that something is more than a 
memory or influence. Wordsworth calls the doc- 
trine of a future life “the head and mighty para- 
mount of truths.” The religion of humanity 
dangles before our eyes the prospect of affectionate 
remembrance and honour from posterity, but one 
may well have misgivings about such a prospect. 
Most of the men we have met with in life know 
little and care less about our best deeds, or the 
wrongs that may have been inflicted upon us; and 


TE they show so little interest when we are above 
T, 


162 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


eround, it is not likely that they will embalm us 
in a particularly fragrant immortality when we go 
underground and mix with unconscious dust. The 
dead he forgotten in the grave,— 


“Their memory and their name is gone, 
Alike unknowing and unknown.“ 


‘If the promise of posthumous immortality were 
as good as a Bank of England note,” some one has 
said, ‘how could it satisfy my craving?” It is 
the prerogative of a personal conscious being, who 
does not make God in his image, but believes that 
God made him in His image, to cry with a con- 
viction of inextinguishable life, ‘“‘ Art Thou not from 
everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? we 
shall not die.” The sense of individuality relates 
every one who feels it to God and immortality, 
and inspires him with a “faith that looks through 
death.” All other creatures go down unconsciously 
to their fate, but man looks before and after, and 
no thought affects him with such moral impressive- 
ness as this one, “It is appointed unto man once 
to die, and after death the judgment.” Conscience, 
the calmer and clearer it is, points to the day of 
judgement, and bids every man live in sight of it. 

The intellect of man, no less than his conscience, 
demands a future life for the highest products of 


— 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 163 


lite on earth. Think of the nature and mind of 
man, that soars to a conception like the solidarity 
of the universe; think of that concentration of 
consciousness and intelligence which exists by 
| itself, alone and inviolable, and constitutes in- 
dividual character — shall that wonderful instru- 
ment, so akin to Deity, after a few year’s 
preparation, be broken up and laid aside for ever ? 
Shall those indomitable energies that have subdued 
nature, extracted her secrets, and made her do the 
bidding of man — that teeming imagination, 
instinct with ideas of truth and beauty—those 
high and generous sympathies that have prompted 
heroic efforts to restore the rights of humanity or 
rescue souls from the bondage of sin—that stern 
conscientiousness which has refused to hold its 
tongue for the sake of position, and has preferred 
poverty and reproach to the utterance of one false 
word or the sacrifice of principle —shall these 
greatest works of the Maker’s mind, these brightest 
emanations of His Spirit, vanish out of existence, 
with the mechanical instincts of the brute? Shall 
the intellect of a Plato and Newton, the sanctity 
of an Augustine and Fenelon, and the philanthropy 
of a Howard and Wilberforce, dissolve into their 
elements, like the sap that once circulated in the 


164 THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 


cells of forest monarchs, or the breath that animated 
the giant monsters of a primeval world? If such 
personal being could melt away into nothing, then 
here is such a miracle of annihilation—such a 
ceasing to be of what is noblest upon earth—that 
it stultifies the intellect, as no other miracle does, 
and surpasses belief. 

The heart of man craves a future life. The 
religion of humanity cannot meet the need of 
beings such as we are, placed in such a world as 
ours, if it forbids us to pass the visible horizon. 
It cannot help us to interpret the riddle of the 
sphinx, to face the insistent facts of sin, suffering, 
and misery. Gather up into your heart of hearts 
the sense of wrongs unredressed, of misery unre- 
lieved, of griefs beyond remedy, of failure without 
hope, of physical pain so acute as to be the one 
overmastering reality in a world of shadows, of 
mental depression so dismal as to make physical 
pain a relief, and it is enough to crack the heart- 
strings, and shatter ther power of endurance, if 
to this world only we restrict our gaze. Is not 
this the problem of the Book of Job, and is not 
the solution only found when a glimpse of immor- 
tality, like the dayspring from on high, visits the 
pilgrim of the night ¢ 


THE GOSPEL AND POSITIVISM. 165 


The heart of man craves a future life, and He 
who made the heart will not disappoint or con- 
tradict that longing, but will keep His word. He 
has met the craving, and kept His word. For He 
says, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love,” 
and that everlasting love makes its appeal to our 
hearts by holding out before our eyes an immor- 
tality of bliss. God has set eternity in our hearts ; 
He has planted the thought, the consciousness of 
it, and the longing after it; and bright shoots of 
everlastingness grow up in it. But they increase 
in force, and flourish by the knowledge of Him 
who has abolished death, and brought life and 
immortality to ight in the gospel, who says, “He 
that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.” 
We think too much of death and too little of the 
fulness of life to which it is the way. The oreat 
poet just gone from us was in the habit of saying 
to his friends, “You know as well as I that death 
is life, just as our daily, our momentarily, dying 
body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new 
forces of existence. Without death, which is our 
crape-like word for change, for growth, there could 
be no prolongation of that which we call life. For 
myself, I deny death as an end of everything. 
Never say of me that I am dead.” And with his 


166 LAE GOSPEL AND-POSTTIVISM, 


words, which General Gordon thought the finest 
lines in English poetry he had ever read, let us 
close the argument,— 
“T go to prove my soul ; 

I see my way as birds their trackless way. 

I shall arrive! What time, what circuit first, 

I ask not; but, unless God send His hail, 

Or blinding fireballs, sleet, or stifling snow, 

In good time—His good time—I shall arrive. 


He guides me and the bird. 
In His good time.” 


In conclusion, positivism, the religion of human- 
ity, can be no rival to Christianity. It may meet 
the tastes of a few who have picked up the bone 
which agnosticism has flune to those who still 
want a religion of some kind, but it cannot satisfy 
the multitude who are struggling with daily needs 
and narrow cares, who want to know that there is 
no human being so insignificant as not to be of 
countless worth in the eyes of Him who created 
allthings. It cannot offer consolation to those who 
are in grief, hope to the bereaved, strength to the 
weak, forgiveness to the sinful, rest to the weary 
and heavy laden. Christianity has answered all 
these needs in the past ; and while it has power to 
do so, it will verify its claim to be the everlasting 


gospel—the only true religion of humanity. 


VET 
THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALISM, 


Ir we carefully read the signs of the times, we 
cannot fail to note that religion is becoming 
decidedly less doctrinal and more practical among 
us; we are emerging out of the theological into 
the sociological stage of human progress. Socialisin 
is one of the prevailing movements of the time; 
the currents of opinion and feeling run strongly in 
this direction; it stirs every country in Europe, 
and gains the adherence of some of its most 
eminent thinkers. Parliament and press ring with 
proofs that social questions are to the front. The 
dim populations, as heht dawns on them, welcome 
it everywhere as a new gospel. Socialism is in the 
air, and as 1t sweeps on, men in high places 
recognise the movement, and express their sympathy 
with it. The churches vie with each other in a 
desire to catch its breezes. At Church Congresses 


bishops descant on its claims, and do so with a 
167 


168 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


tone and temper which indicates that many of 
those claims are rooted in justice and ought to be 
complied with. There is much in socialism which 
entitles it to be spoken of as a standard lifted up 
for the people ; as a standard which may be lifted 
up by any Christian minister, whose mission it 1s 
to set forth Christ’s gospel as a social gospel, a 
kingdom of heaven upon earth. Many of our 
critical and ecclesiastical questions sink into’ 
insignificance before the problem of the best 
means, consistent with equity and justice, for 
bringing about a more equal division of the 
products of industry, and making it possible for 
all to lead a dignified life, and less difficult for all 
to lead a good life. 

Our great and many-sided gospel has no need to 
fear this socialistic crusade, but is able to guide 
and inspire it. If it is set up as a rival by many 
of its leaders, we can afford to be calm and un- 
disturbed in presence of such a claim. For the ~ 
ideas and sentiments which have developed 
socialism came at first from Christianity, and must 
still come before its aspirations can be realised. 
Every Christian, who accepts the teaching, example, 
and spirit of his Master, has a socialistic vein in 


him, and it is in Christian countries that socialistic 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 169 


doctrines make the most decided advance. They 
are largely touched, and should be wholly pene- 
trated, with the spirit of Christianity. 


MISCONCEPTIONS. 


It is necessary to remove certain prejudices 
which have arisen from not trying clearly to 
understand what socialism is. The term is some- 
what elastic and too comprehensive, and one, 
therefore, which may be thought to embrace all 
sorts of fads and all conditions of opinion. There 
are many phases of socialism, which make it 
apparently one of the most elusive and contradic- 
tory phenomena of our time. We read, in books 
on the subject, of Tory and Radical socialists, of 
Roman Catholic and Protestant socialists, of 
Christian and Atheistic socialists, of State and 
Communal socialists, and so forth. From this it 
will appear that the movement is protean in its 
forms, and connects itself with the most opposite 
opinions. This may only show, however, its 
vital and adaptive spirit, while laying it open to 
many objections. 

In the opinion of many, socialism of the present 
day is out and out anti-religious and hostile to 
the Church. Religion, it says, deceives the 


170 THE GOSPELLIAND SOCIAZIOM:. 


common people by teaching them to submit to 
their wrongs and miseries, and presenting them 
with a cheque payable in heaven ; and the Church 
ought to perish, because it is a police institution 
for upholding capital. On the Continent they call it 
the Red Spectre, and here many regard it as a thing 
essentially of the evil one, and therefore to be re- 
sisted by Christians. There is an extreme party 
who, in their propaganda, aim at atheism, and 
hate Christianity as not only alien but hostile to 
their doctrines. Such atheistic and antichristian 
opinions are not, however, a necessary concomitant 
of socialism; they are accidental features of the 
movement, and do not belong to its essence ; they 
are held by a fanatical few, not by the main body 
of leaders and followers and sympathisers. 

Others, again, have been led to believe that 
socialism wants to abolish marriage and the family. 
Some theorists in this school have proposed to 
socialise marriage, like everything else, but they 
are a dwindling few compared with those who 
accept the Christian ideal of marriage and family 
life. Such opinions are not due to socialism, and 
such practices are followed rather by the pampered 
sons of fortune against whom socialism lifts up a 


standard. This new movement, on the contrary, 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 171 
has done much to enlarge and elevate our working 
idea of woman; it has gone hand in hand with our 
Christian gospel in proclaiming the equality of the 
sexes and abolishing the double standard of morals 
adopted towards them; it has helped to throw 
open doors of industry and usefulness to women 
which were too long closed; and it pleads to let 
them have a share in making the laws under which 
they live and suffer. 

Once more, socialism is thought by a great many 
to be a crusade against private property, and to seek 
resort to confiscation and robbery in accomplishing 
its designs. There is a fundamental enmity between 
the revolutionary spirit and the spirit of Christian- 
ity. The revolutionary spirit is materialistic ; the 
Christian is spiritual. At once it may be admitted 
that some of its followers advocate extreme opinions 
of this kind, and revolutionary measures to subvert 
the present economic and social basis; but the 
quintessence of socialism, as stated by its ablest 
expounders, contemplates nothing of the sort. It 
is a gross perversion of the truth to say that it 
demands that every one should share and share 
alike. It is unfair to describe it as an attempt to 
plunder the rich for the benefit of the poor. Many 


imagine that the entire wealth of the community 


172 LHE GOSPEL: AND SOCIALISM. 


is to be divided into equal parts, and that each 
will have a share of it for his own use. No socialist 
with an ounce of sense in his head credits such 
nonsense, and the merest tyro can show that in 
twenty-four hours this sort of equality will be 
upset, and the old evils return. Socialism, being 
so obscurely conceived, and sometimes so persist- 
ently misunderstood, gives rise in many minds to 
an absurd amount of exaggerated fears, and calls 
forth no end of ignorant and flippant criticism. 
Mr. Spurgeon once described the difference between 
Christianity and Communism thus: “ Christianity 
says, ‘All mine is thine.’ Communism says, ‘ All 


one 


thine is mine. Christianity does not teach that 
‘All mine is thine, if it enunciates the sacredness 
of personal property; and Communism, so far as 
we read of it in the Acts, was the exact opposite of 
the saying, ‘“‘ All thine is mine.” Besides, it 1s not 

true that socialism says, ‘‘ All mine is thine.” We 
| deprecate such a statement of the question. It 
does certainly contemplate a fairer division of the 
fruits of industry, but not an equal division of 
property. Without doubt, the cardinal principle 
underneath all phases of socialism is an economic 
one, in which the means of production should 


become the collective property of the national or 


LHE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 173 
rg eee ee ee 


communal body with a view to an equitable 
distribution of the fruits of labour; but it is not 
a necessary part of the socialistic programme to 


advocate the confiscation of property or its com- 
pulsory division among the people. 


GRIEVANCES, 


Until lately the movement could be dismissed 
with a shallow sneer, or a gross mis-statement of 
the truth ; but now it is deemed worthy of earnest 
and sympathetic consideration on the part of the 
best religious, philosophical, and political thinkers. 
It is unwise to treat it in any other way. As it 
rests on a wide basis of discontent among the toil- 
ing multitudes, the effect of suppression is to drive 
it underground, where it crows fierce, and becomes 
a hidden danger ready to burst forth into the wild 
justice of revenge. 

The historian, De Tocqueville, profoundly ob- 
serves, that “when the people are overwhelmed 
with misery, they are resigned. It is when they 
begin to hold up their heads, and to look above 
them, that they are impelled to insurrection.” The 
dim populations of many lands have begun to look 
up, and to discover that they have been “the dis- 
inherited of the world ;” and it is a fact for good or 


174 THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALEID&M. 


ill that a spirit of discontent and revolt is steadily 
permeating the labouring classes of all countries. 
A belief in divine justice, and a desire to see it 
realised in human relations, leads of necessity to 
the condemnation of iniquity, however established 
by prescription, and to aspirations that are at once 
levelling and resistless. The socialist brings the 
pitiless sphinx once more into the midst of society, 
and sets before our generation the old riddle in a 
new shape; he tells us that it threatens to devour 
our churches, and our gospel too, unless it has 
some fresh solution for these social wrongs and 
miseries. He is a pessimist, to begin with, as he 
sets forth the bad side of the social state, as he 
points to the strong crushing the weak, the rich 
making gain out of the poor, inequality becoming 
harsher, and misery sinking into despair. But then 
he aspires to an ideal where social well-being can 
be attained and the conditions of labour improved. 

As a movement for the deliverance of the poor 
from their unfavourable surroundings, the Christian 
churches ought to sympathise with it, and take their 
place in the van of social reform ; but it 1s a com- 
plaint of socialists that the churches are indifferent 
to social well-being. If it has been the fault of 


socialists to forget that man has got a soul, no less 


LHE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 175 


has it been the fault of Christians to forget that he 
has got a body. <A popular preacher often quotes 
the saying that “some very earnest Christians are 
so diligently engaged in saving souls that they 
have no time to save men and women.” Is there 
not some ground for the reproach that Christians 
are so absorbed in their own individual salvation as 
to neglect the wants of their suffering fellowmen ? 
Religion ought to deal with physical, no less than 
with spiritual wants. Did not Christ attend to the 
bodies as well as to the souls of men, when He was 
upon earth? Misery abounds everywhere. Great 
evils fascinate and compel public attention. Here 
it is the shame of putting women into mills or 
factories to be overwrought, underpaid, and forced 
to work under the most enervating conditions, or 
the woe of seamstresses struggling in garrets to 
sustain a precarious existence ; there it is the mis- 
chief of the sweating system, that consumes the 
bone and muscle of its victims in insanitary work- 
shops. Sometimes the pitiable tale is of men who 
have been exposed to the grievous and depraving 
effects of being out of work ; then it is a picture of 
labourers at the dock gates fighting like wild beasts 
for tickets to get the chance of a job, or of thou- 


sands and thousands of dockers on strike, when 


176 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


some of them, hungry and weary, could be seen at 
their big meetings, “ falling down like rotten sheep,” 
as their great leader put it, while their wives and 
children were suffering unspeakable misery at 
home. 

We cannot close our eyes any longer to these 
social distresses, or hold our tongues. It becomes 
Christians to ‘speak up” in their Master’s name 
for the oppressed and the poor. Who were the 
spokesmen of these miserable dockmen in making 
a righteous demand? Not the ministers of Jesus 
Christ ; not the magnates of the religious world ; 
but a few socialists who, amid the starving multi- 
tudes, kept themselves and the sufferers in such 
moderation and self-control as to be the admiration 
of the world. What will the issue be if in these 
life-and-death struggles the people look to Chris- 
tians and find them “‘dumb dogs,” while socialists 
put every power at their service? It should be the 
bitterest drop to us that social progress is mainly 
effected by men opposed to our churches and our 
religion. Nothing is so deplorable as the nerve- 
less and cowardly apathy against which the stones 
are crying out. ‘he only place for Christians is to 
be in the van of every battle with iniquity, first in 
all self-denying reforms, and ready for the task of 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 177 


social salvation, Our lives should be full of a 
divine and passionate love, full from end to end of 
a holy and ardent pity for men who suffer wrong 
at the hands of men, and for whom hardly a voice 
is raised. Never let the orphan’s rags, the stain of 
woman, and the anguish of the toiler appeal to us 
in vain. Lift up a standard for the people. 

The chief causes of discontent in the ranks of 
labour are attributed by socialists to insufficient 
and uncertain employment, to the unequal distribu- 
tion of the fruits of labour between the master and 
workman, and to the ever-increasing difficulty of 
the intelligent wage-earner in attaining a compet- 
ency. ‘These are conditions as old as the history 
of human industry, but the present economic 
industrial system is said to be specially productive 
of these evils, and the misery which springs out of 
these evils is said to be incalculable. That suffer- 
ing is often exaggerated, sometimes absurdly so; 
nevertheless it is great, as the strike of 150,000 
dock labourers has recently shown. The unskilled 
and half-skilled labour of the country has lifted 
up its voice, and uttered its cry of vast, deep 
discontent, and it is a lesson which all of us should 
take to heart. From this class the next trouble 


will come, and under the conditions of our civilisa- 
M 


178 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


tion they have a genuine grievance. ‘Their fellow- 
workmen of the higher grades have strongly sym- 
pathised with them, and pledged themselves to do 
everything in their power to forward their proper 
organisation and secure for them the just reward 
of labour. Such complaints, so far as they are just, 
every patriot and every Christian must ponder, and 
feel more or less indignant that they should exist 
at all, to make the lot of the poor toiler so insecure — 
and hard. “Justice is the crying want of the 
world,” and few of us but hear some of its most 
piercing tones in William Morris’s “March of the 
Workers,’ — 


“These are they who build thy houses, weave thy raiment, win 
thy bread, 
Smooth the rugged, fill the barren, turn the bitter into sweet, 
All for thee this day and ever. What reward for them is 
meet ? 
Till the host comes marching on. 


Many a hundred years passed over have they laboured, deaf 
and blind: 
Never tidings reached their sorrow, never hope their toil 
might find ; 
Now at last they’ve heard and hear it, and the cry comes 
down the wind, 
And their feet are marching on. 


O ye rich men, hear and tremble! for with words the sound 
is rife, 
Once for you and death we labour, changed henceforward is 
the strife ; 
We are men, and we shall battle for the world of men and life, 
And our host is marching on. 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 179 


Is it war, then? Will ye perish as the dry wood on the fire? 
Is it peace? Then be ye of us, let your hope be our desire. 
Come and live! for life awaketh, and the world shall never 
tire, 
And hope is marching on, 


On we march, then, we the workers, and the rumow that ye 
hear 
Is the blended sound of battle and deliverance drawing near ; 
For the hope of every creature is the banner that we bear, 
And the world is marching on.” 


AImMs. 


There are socialists and socialists, as we have 
indicated ; there is a socialism that is irreligious, 
and there is a socialism that is Christian. It has 
been a vague word on men’s lips, and is likely to 
be so for some time to come, and consequently its 
aims are open to a great deal of misunderstanding. 
It includes a revolutionary anarchist like Bakunin, 
who seeks by any and every means to destroy all 
institutions and to overthrow all authority, as well 
as a constructive statesman like Bismarck, who has 
tried his hand at legislative solutions of the social] 
question. Certain men turn up in Trade Unionist 
Congresses and at times of social upheaval, and 
propound socialistic doctrines that are dangerous. 
Trades Unionism is itself a marked triumph of this 
movement, and has put the skilled labour of the 
United Kingdom in a position superior to that of 


180 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


any other nation on the face of the earth, but it 
is more or less haunted by a class of socialists 
who are faddists and fanatics—men who bring for- 
ward sensational programmes, propose extravagant 
schemes, and excite passions without doing an atom 
of good for the cause of social well-being. Depend 
upon it that the mere agitators make a great deal 
more show in the world than is at all proportionate 
to their real influence. Nor let them have such 
influence as to turn us from the consideration of 
social and economic questions in a calm, but 
thoroughgoing manner. 

A double aim marks the gospel of socialism, 
and the social gospel of Christ does not look 
askance upon the one or the other. Of all in- 
fluences favourable to their accomplishment, the 
most potent has been the religious; and of all 
religions, that of Christ, with its doctrine of the 
Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and 
the law of righteousness, has been the most favour- 
able. 

The first aim is essential, and underlies every 
form of social regeneration, and seeks to socialise 
the industrialism of modern times, making it sub- 
servient to human good. We find the question at 
bottom to be an economic one; what is desired is 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. iSF - 


some economic readjustment by which the poor 
toilers, so long excluded from, may be included in 
a fair participation in the best blessings of cultiva- 
tion and enjoyment. The problem in Adam 
Smith’s day was how wealth could be secured, 
and this country has solved it in a way to be the 
wonder and envy of nations. To-day the problem 
is the distribution of wealth, and we are just at 
the beginning of it. What is the ‘“ Quintessence 
of Socialism,” as put by Schaffle, one of its ablest 
expounders? However variously conceived may 
be its aim (of the socialism of to-day), he says 
that “critically and practically, the cardinal thesis 
stands out :—(1) Collective instead of private 
ownership of all instruments of production, land, 
factories, machines, ete.; (2) Organisation of 
labour by society, instead of the distracting 
competition of individualism; (3) Distribution 
of collective output of all kinds of manufacture, 
in proportion to the value of work done by 
each worker.” The author of An Inquiry 
unto Socialism expounds the same view with 
sagacious and powerful force, and declares that 
this is the scientific form of the movement, and 
is “ merely a reflection or mirroring in the human 


intelligence of a great world-historic process, which 


182 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


is fulfilling itself, whether we see it or not, whether 
we will it or not.” 

Now, this question of the distribution of wealth, 
while based on economics, does not lie outside the 
consideration of a gospel minister. It is really a 
religious question, and religious men are bound to 
face it. Has not our social gospel much light and 
healing to give here ¢ 

But socialism has a broader aim, and compre- 
hends « group of questions that pertain to social 
amelioration and improvement. It is the outcome 
of a strong aspiration for a better life among the 
workers ; an aspiration that stirs many minds, and 
is felt among many of the rich and cultured classes 
as keenly as among the workers themselves. ive 
problem of the social man is a complex one, and 
needs to be attacked from all sides. There are 
social evils, whose name is legion, and the 
methods of social regeneration need to be as 
manifold. As a movement for the deliverance 
of the poor, and their introduction to a good and 
happy life, the gospel of God’s love in Christ 
thoroughly agrees with socialism. There is a 
broad line of distinction between the two. Social- 
ism insists on external and economic conditions 


for good ; Christianity insists on the inward and 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALISM. 183 


moral, because all social disorders are spiritual at 
heart, and the spiritual is the ultimate root of all 
life. Socialism makes the community the final 
and absolute proprietor of all wealth ; Christianity 
makes God the proprietor, and us His stewards for 
others. Socialism too much seeks to enforce its 
doctrine of property by brute force; Christianity, 
by the moral leaven of love in the soul of man. 
The socialist cannot get rid of selfishness, and finds 
his best schemes frustrated by its subtle and 
constant intrusion; Jesus meets this disorder of 
sin completely by His message of good-will to 
men—even the commendation of His own love to 
us, in that, while we were yet sinners, He died 
for us, and offers this mighty lever of His self- 
sacrificing and persistent love to erect man above 
himself. The socialist thinks by equalising human 
conditions to secure the greatest amount of comfort 
and happiness, and forgets that you may materialise 
man a thousand times, and give him science and 
culture, and yet fail to impart to him the secret 
of satisfaction and peace. Dives is but a poor 
ideal to work for after all. On the other hand, 
Jesus Christ teaches that all vital development 
must be spontaneous, and from within; that a 


change of character is to be sought rather than 


184 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


a change of conditions; that this life lasts but 
a while, and is essentially a period of training, 
in which adverse conditions may work endurance, 
fortitude, and resignation, and so achieve that 
holiness which alone crowns a perfect life. 

Now, these are strong and vivid contrasts, which 
we need to keep before our minds in a true study 
of our subject; but having indicated them, let us 
co on to say that Christianity and socialism need 
not be spoken of as rivals: they are compatible, 
and should not be made parties ina quarrel. The 
fact is that socialism needs to be Christianised, 
and that Christianity needs to be socialised. ‘The 
Church should not take so much trouble, either 
by flourishings of the Ten Commandments, or by 
sneers at Utopian reconstructions of society, in 
which there shall be no rich churlish men and no 
poor discontented men, to protest against a sort 
of socialism that bawls out in Trafalgar Square, 
or fights behind the barricade. Let friends of the 
gospel purify it of whatever anarchic and revolu- 
tionary temper it may show, recognise how souls 
may be crushed by the weight of an antagonistic 
social environment, learn from socialism that there 
is a moral value in good housing, sanitary improve- 


ment, free libraries, and open spaces, and strive 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 185 


more than ever, by that enthusiasm of humanity 
which it most powerfully generates, to secure a 
greater amenity of life for the poor. Christ, and 
Christ alone, gives us power to achieve the purest 
aims of unselfish and generous service. In Him do 
we find method, pattern, and impulse necessary to 
the highest well-being of society. There at His 
cross shines “the light that never was on sea or 
shore,” to make men “alight with social ideals, 
aflame with social ardours, astir to seize every 
opportunity of social usefulness ;” and there, with 
a passion of righteousness born from above, let 
each of us take up a standard for the people, and 
inscribe on it these words of Victor Hugo to his 
friend Lamartine: “ A society that admits misery, 
a humanity that admits war, seem to me an 
inferior society and a debasing humanity; it is a 
higher society and a more elevated humanity at 
which I am aiming ... I want to universalise 
property, not to abolish it; I would suppress 
parasitism ; I want to see every man a proprietor, 
and no man a master. This is my idea of true 
social economy. The goal may be far distant, 
but is that a reason for not striving to advance 
towards it? Yea, as much as a man can long for 
anything, I long to destroy human fatality. I 


186 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


condemn slavery; I chase away every misery. | 
instruct ignorance ; I illumine darkness; | discard 
malice. Hence it is that I have written Les 
Miserables.” 

From this examination of the subject are 
suggested a few lessons which we should take to 
heart. And the first is, the duty of mimsters of 
religion to be students of the social question, and 
preachers of righteousness with reference to at. 
The question is as old as the selfish cry of the first 
murderer, “ Am I my brother’s keeper?” It was 
the burning question which prophets of the Old 
Testament did not fear to take up; they dealt 
honestly with social wrong, and were martyrs for 
protesting against it. Jesus Christ was despised 
and rejected of men, cast out by the leaders of 
“society” for being the friend of the poor, 
maimed, halt, and blind. The greatest social 
reformer was Jesus Christ, and they crucified 
Him for being so. Men who speak bitterly of 
the caste and coldness, pride and selfishness of 
the Christian society, always except the Divine 
Founder, who was the Friend of the poor and 
the Saviour of the lost. The Church was the 
original propagator of socialistic theories and 


measures. The writings of the Fathers expound 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 187 


fren To anes the Chiridieay mera i 
the early monarchs, ecclesiastics in the dark ages 
picked out certain theories from the Scriptures and 
Church Fathers, and endeavoured to persuade the 
ruling classes to mitigate the hard lot of the masses 
of the period. Most of the proposals which the 
leading socialists of our own day squabble about 
so furiously among themselves, are to be found 
inculeated in the writings of medieval doctors and 
schoolmen. Gradually, as Christian communities 
became more humane, the Church abandoned its 
socialistic mission. For some centuries the Church 
has waived its right to intervene in the social and 
economical policy of the nations, but within the 
last few years all the churches have begun to set 
up once more a claim to speak on such matters. 
Two clergymen of the Church of England will long 
be remembered for their sympathy with the work- 
ing classes—Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles 
Kingsley; they were not ashamed to be called 
Christian Socialists at a time when the name was a 
reproach. No later than last year a conference of 
bishops at Lambeth suggested that candidates for 
orders should possess “ some knowledge of economic 
science.” 


Christian ministers should take a position in the 


1°8 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


van of social progress; they need not take a side 
in party politics, but they should take a very deter- 
mined stand in every matter which affects the well- 
being, the health, and the morality of the people. 
‘Ye ministers of His that do His pleasure,” where 
are you in the midst of these social grievances, and 
what is the word on your lips? ’Tis not for them 
to make timid complaints about the fermenting 
restlessness on every side, and to speak of social 
movements as antichristian, when the Church may 
be sitting at its ease, or be less Christian than the 
movements on which they look down with pharisaic 
disdain. ‘“ Did Christ smile on colossal accumula- 
tions of property, and pronounce benedictions over 
the rich and full, that we should call movements 
antichristian, the first motive of which is _ to 
champion the cause of the poor, and protest against 
the concentration of the nation’s wealth in the 
hands of men who are callous to their vast re- 
sponsibilities ? There is a broad line of distinction 
between Christ and the socialist. But the line 
of distinction between Christ and the selfish pluto- 
erat is broader still.” 

Is there some truth in the averment, that 
Christian congregations are becoming clubs here and 


shops there, and that Church schemes are wrought 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 189 


by the dominating spirit of commercialism? And 
are ministers of the gospel such clerical personages 
as Henrick Ibsen, the Norwegian poet, is making 
us acquainted with, mere exponents of traditional 
religion and conventional morality—sincere and 
devout, but obsequious to the classes, and in- 
capable of grasping a new idea, striking at privi- 
leged injustice, or of sympathising with a generous 
emotion? I know but one answer, and it is that 
they come to the social question with insight, 
and learn that it is not sordid and secular, and 
unworthy of men who worship God, and look for 
immortality. Old questions of theology and 
worship, polity and service, are finding a new 
expression in terms of equality and righteousness, 
fraternity and fellowship. Ministers have been 
trained for theology, and why not for this great 
movement? Do you say, “It is au fond an 
economic question.” Quite so. Then the duty 
is to study economics. ‘Their business 1s to under- 
stand the questions connected therewith, and to 
do so in no partisan spirit, but with eyes of justice 
that cannot see the rags of the poor, or the glitter- 
ing gold of the rich, and prepared to go as far as 
the principle carries that “there is no respect of 
persons with God.” Let us approach the subject 


190 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


without partiality or hypocrisy, declaring boldly 
the laws of righteousness and charity, so that the 
poor may be led to bless our gospel, and the rich 
to use their talents as our gospel constrains. Our 
office is mediatorial: let us hold the balance even 
between contending parties. Which Church will 
gain the strongest influence over the life of the 
people? The social problem is the field on which 
the decisive battle must be fought. 

Again, the social question conveys a lesons to 
the rich. 

It is not envy of the rich and privileged class 
that accounts for socialist dislike, but the evils 
that wealth is apt to generate. It is often a 
temptation to luxury, to an idle and indulgent 
life. Dives is the least acceptable of ideals ; Dives 
doling out as much perhaps to Lazarus as barely 
keeps soul and body together, and then preaching 
the gospel of content to the poor, is not a lovely 
sight. The rich have to be warned against this 
temptation, and pointed to that other picture of 
the Good Samaritan—the man with the big heart 
and open hand, who pours “ oil and wine” into the 
gaping wounds of gore distress, and takes infinite 
trouble to help the victims of tyrannical strength. 

Wealth is likewise a temptation to social 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. Igt 


injustice. It tempts to purse pride and churlish- 
ness, caste distinction and the insolence of 
superiority. It tends to the growth of parasitism, 
threatens to withdraw its custom if due servility 
is not shown, and commits enormities of private 
selfishness that are shamefully unjust. Not only 
does such a temptation vulgarise and debase the 
rich and those who believe in them, but it creates 
misery and produces despair, and so fosters vice 
and sensualism and socialism among the poor. 
The Church should warn the rich against this 
temptation, and lay upon them the responsibility 
of using their means for the good of others as 
unselfishly as if they parted with all, and must do 
so if they would seek protection from snares that 
constantly threaten to master them. The more 
we are entangled in a rich society, the more is such 
warning needed. God intends us to be the 
members of a rich community, with distributed 
functions, with increasing command over the 
products of the earth. But He intends us to 
rule these earthly things as instruments of the 
spirit, and not use them as the mammon of 
unrighteousness. 

Once more, the social question has cts lesson for 
the poor. 


192 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


Whatever evils may be produced by the existing 
economic conditions, there are other fruitful 
sources of mischief against which the poor must 
be admonished. What brings poverty and misery 
into countless homes? JIndolence, improvidence, 
intemperance—all these are anti-social and anti- 
christian, and they cause untold sufferings among 
the masses of the people. If these vices could be 
given up, and the opposite virtues of industry, 
forethought, and temperance become universal 
among the poor, they would bring to an end a 
condition of things under which it is impossible for 
men to spend decent and happy lives. Most 
commercial fortunes are made by saving. Many 
of the rich began as labourers or office boys, and 
have risen by their own talents. If the poor were 
industrious, sober, and thrifty, more than half our 
social ills would disappear, and contentment and 
happiness would prevail everywhere. 


VIL. 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM 
SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 


AN evangelist tells us that the heart of Jesus Christ 
was moved to its very depths at the sight of the 
masses in His day, and that He felt much for them 
because they were left as sheep without a shepherd; 
they were “distressed and scattered,’ or to come 
nearer His meaning still, “they were worried and 
neglected.” In His time the people were worsted 
and made the prey of the strong, and by those who 
should have helped them in their misery they were 
neclected. They raised the bitter cry unheard, 
‘No man careth for our soul.” But He came and 
mixed with the people, He trusted and cared for 
them, He spent His life among them doing good ; 
and when He was challenged to give evidences of 
His divine gospel, tokens of His supernatural 
mission, He said, ‘‘ Go your way, and tell John the 
things which ye do hear and see; the blind receive 


their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are 
N 


194 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are 
raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached 
unto them. And blessed is he who shall not be 
offended in Me.” 

Now, it is a notable sign of the times that the 
compassion of Christ for the multitude stirs in 
many hearts. Bitter cries are lifted up, and gain 
a hearing as they never had before; the “ priests” 
and “ Levites” of ceremonial religion dare not 
hurry past the groans of their suffering fellows, 
when so many of Christ’s “‘Good Samaritans” are 
caring for the least of His brothers and sisters in 
their hunger, poverty, and woe. ‘The Spirit of 
Christ is come to convince the world of its long and 
euilty neglect; yea, to convince the churches of 
their sin in not undertaking with more definite 
purpose and sustained enthusiasm the great task of 
social salvation, and dealing effectively with the 
misery at their very doors.” 

We hail it as a sign of revived Christ-likeness 
that the hapless lot of the multitude is burning 
itself into the moral imagination of the world, and 
is kindling the enthusiasm of humanity in all the 
churches, and is rousing the public conscience of 
to-day to ask, with an insistence unknown in the 


world’s history, “Who is my neighbour?” On 


SOCTAL GRIEVANCES. 195 


all sides men are learning that the possession of 
any gift carries with it corresponding responsi- 
bilities ; let us who call ourselves Christians learn 
that our lives here are not to be lives merely of 
personal ease, but lives instinct with a sense of 
duty, and a deep pity for those who are miserable 
and out of the way and in need of such help as we 
can give, ‘The churches could,” says Mr. Tillet, 
“were they to put their shoulders to the wheel, be 
the architects to build up greater nobility in the 
manhood of the country.” What has not been 
learned half enough yet, is to look after the 
material welfare of the people, for their moral 
condition largely depends on their social surround- 
ings. Unless the latter are attended to, the 
spiritual good so often aimed at will be almost a 
failure. Christianity, if it is to recover lost ground, 
must include the bodies as well as the souls of 
men in its efforts, and must be ready again with 
the answer of its Founder to John the Baptist, in 
order to make good its claim to be a divine and 
world-wide religion. 

Socialism, as already pointed out, is one of the 
most vital and powerful movements of the age; a 
contemporary expression of social grievances which 
have been borne for centuries by the sweating 


196 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


millions of labour. ‘The name stands for a group 
of problems whose ultimate aim is to secure the 
elevation of the poor. We cannot undertake to 
mention the numerous causes of wrong and misery 
that prevail around us. For the most part the 
difficulties of our time are only the expression 
of the discontent of the democracy, as it grows 
better educated and organised, with the insecurity 
and degradation of its position. It is possible only 
to notice, and that at no great length, a few of 
the social problems that engage public attention. 
Men have a vague notion that there is “ something 
wrong somewhere,” and that it needs, whether 
from a Christian or socialist point of view, to be 
mended or ended. 

Take, for instance, the problem of Pawperism. 

There is no more terrible and troublesome 
symptom of social disease, and it has been for 
ages the opprobrium of political economy. Philo- 
sophers have suggested one plan after another to 
banish this gaunt spectre from society; idealists 
have dreamed of model republics where more 
productive lands and more propitious skies would 
satisfy material wants without sweat of brow. 
Malthusian theories, Fourierite projects, and com- 
munistic societies have been proposed and 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 197 


attempted only to find failure persistently at their 
heels. Pauperism not only remains in every land, 
but grows more inveterate and menacing as the 
world advances in civilisation. The ragged host 
that stalks through the land is nearly one hundred 
thousand strong; thousands upon thousands more 
are placed in barracks up and down the country, 
while the slums of our cities and towns are crowded 
with sweltering masses of poverty. Socialism 
tries to go to the root of this squalid destitution, 
tries to show that it is due to wrong economic laws, 
which, if they are wrong, ought to be set right, 
and maintains that an economic readjustment in 
the interests of the poor man, would so reduce 
poverty that what remained could only exist as the 
just punishment of idleness or vice. Christian 
philanthropy, on the other hand, looks at the 
deeper yet more patent causes of selfish indolence 
and sin as the fruitful source of poverty, and 
recognises how much true insight there is in 
Christ's words, “For ye have the poor with you 
always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them 
good.” 

Pauperism may be regarded as the general 
resultant of all the bad and all the omitted 
legislation of the last five hundred years. The 


198 THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALISM— 


Poor Law began in the reign of Elizabeth, with 
the Act of 1601, and for nearly three centuries 
English economists have worked away at it. Not 
only did that legislation supersede the dole at the 
monastery gates, but all religious bodies, Pro- 
testant and Roman Catholic, have created organisa- 
tions for distributing charity. What has been the 
result? The evil has not been lessened. Poverty 
is one of the great social problems still. Social 
reformers stand before it, distressed and beaten. 
How ineffective and disastrous to the best interests 
of human benevolence, both legal relief and 
institutional charity have proved to be, we. all 
know. Charity by law has turned the poor man 
into a pauper or person with a right to be provided 
for, and this creation of pauperism has bred some 
of the worst mischiefs. Its effects have been 
disabling and degrading upon the poor them- 
selves, breaking down. self-reliance, and leading to 
improvidence. It impairs the bonds of natural 
affection, by releasing children from the duty to 
take care of their parents. The aged poor are 
relegated to the poorhouse by unnatural sons and 
daughters. It dries up the fountains of true 
sympathy and help, thus becoming disastrous not 
not only to the poor, but to the rich as well. The 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 199 


nameless and numberless sweet charities that 
should come to the poor are obstructed by the 
present system. Institutional no less than legal 
charity has gone to create the evils which both of 
them seek to diminish. British benevolence, indis- 
criminately exercised, feeds an army of beggars as 
sturdy as ever tramped through the land. 

Socialism alone has no radical cure; Christianity, 
the charity of Christ, alone shows a more excellent 
way. The problem of poverty is a complex one, 
and no single measure can destroy it, and doubt- 
less it is reduced by such exertions as secure 
intelligence and provident habits. But the only 
thing to avert this alarming evil is to bring the 
rich and poor together again, and this can only be 
done in the old way Christ did it, by carrying the 
gospel of friendliness into the homes of the poor. 
It may be necessary to organise and direct 
benevolence, to guard against fraud and imposi- 
tion, but the one thing needed is a wise and tender 
ministry of personal and voluntary charity to the 
poor, just that sympathy and help which is so 
valuable in our own homes. 

Poorhouses are not the glory of a land; they 
should be superseded, and would be if Christian 
people only waked up in their hosts, and returned 


200 LHE GOSPEL, AND SOCIALISM— 


to Christ's method of caring for the poor. Along 
with individual efforts, united action is much 
needed to abate the evils of poverty. Some 
attempt should be made to centralise our private 
and public charities, and get them reduced to some 
system of wise and careful administration. If al] 
who want to help the poor without pauperising 
them could agree first to wnete, and then divide— 
unite to learn and compare one another’s methods, 
to know the several recipients of charity, and 
divide thereafter each to his own benevolent tasks, 
some of the gravest difficulties we have to contend 
with would be obviated. Abuses would quickly be 
found out, foolish schemes would be prevented, and 
measures tested and seen to be wise would be 
adopted. Volunteers ought to work with official 
bodies ; working men ought to be placed on Boards 
of Guardians; such of them especially as hold 
office in the great Friendly and Co-operative 
Societies ought to have their valuable experience 
still further utilised in the service of the poor. 
By devising such plans of co-operative charity, it 
might be possible, not perhaps to abolish poverty 
altogether, but to abate it greatly, and bring-about 
such a state of things that no one in real need 


would be without the means of relief. 


a 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 201 


Take next, the problem of Drunkenness. 

If we want to cut off the springs of pauperism, 
it is absolutely necessary to repress intemperance. 
Material well-being is comparatively of little worth, 
for however high may be the wages of an artisan, 
they may be spent intemperately till the drink- 
fiend gets possession of him, and brings him and 
his family to the workhouse. Drunkenness is the 
fruitful source of destitution, the parent vice of 
many others, the disgrace of civilisation, the great 
social nuisance of our land. Just think how we 
spend our money. The sum spent upon intoxi- 
cating drink in the United Kingdom is nearly 
twice as great as the total amount paid for bread. 
We pay nearly four times as much for intoxicants 
as we pay for butter and cheese. We spend four 
and a half times as much upon drink as we spend 
upon milk. We spend more than five times as 
much upon drink as we do upon sugar, and nearly 
seven times as much as all our expenditure upon 
tea, coffee, and cocoa. We spend more upon drink 
than the rent-roll of all the farms and all the 
houses in the United Kingdom. We spend about 
twice as much upon drink as our total expenditure 
upon woollen, cotton, and linen. Besides the 
enormous expenditure upon drink, we have to pay 


202 THE GOSPEL‘AND SOCIALISM— 


poor and police rates, costs of insanity, crime, 
vagrancy, accidents, disease, loss of labour, pre- 
mature death, etc., giving at the very least 
another £100,000,000, and making a total loss to 
the nation of more than £200,000,000 yearly. 

Working men! this is the way the money goes! 
If you want to be men, and not fools, avoid drink, 
and shun the public-house. It is a sad thing 
when a man gets into the grip of the drink-demon, 
for to be saved from it he needs a new stomach as 
well as a new heart. A physical crave is begotten, 
and cannot be cured unless the thing which supplies 
it is removed utterly beyond its reach. 

Now, here is a vast social problem, and how 
should we meet it? The problem, indeed, is 
complex and overwhelming, yet no heroic remedies 
are necessary ; the cure is a simple one. Remove 
the cause, the intoxicating drink, and the effect 
will cease. Men will be no longer the bondslaves 
of drink, and three-fourths of the miseries of our 
land would disappear. The practice of sobriety, 
thrift, and such virtues, will tend more to general 
prosperity than the dream of the socialists—a 
redistribution of wealth and property. Let the 
good angel of temperance come into the homes 
of working men, and cast out the drink-fiend: _ 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 203 


each would undergo a social change ; new comforts 
would appear week by week, and something would 
be added to the capital provided for old age. But 
social action is also needed to grapple with the 
drink problem. Many who are not prepared to 
carry self-denial as far in private life as the 
advocates of total abstinence, are yet ready to 
join with them in measures for restricting the sale 
of alcoholic liquors. Public sentiment on this 
subject has advanced to a stage that requires 
something to be done. Social reformers of every 
school unite in their demands to do something, 
and wish by legislative interference to secure more 
or less complete prohibition of the traffic. A power- 
ful organisation of wealthy manufacturers, joined by 
the publicans of the country, exists to oppose any 
reform, and churches as well as civic boards are to 
a large extent in league with the drink traffic. 
But in view of the awful misery which arises from 
the unlimited sale of drink, the time has arrived 
to meet the strength of that party, and overthrow 
it with the sovereign strength of popular authority. 
The duty of licensing establishments for the sale of 
drink should be entrusted to those who represent 
the people, and who are controlled by the people. 
The excessive number of such establishments 


204 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


strikes the eye everywhere, no matter where you 
go, and every right-minded citizen deplores it; and 
my belief is, that if you throw the responsibility 
upon the people of putting down this great social 
evil and danger, the people will rise to the 
emergency. What we want is a carefully regu- 
lated traffic, taken out of the hands of private 
and self-interested parties, and managed by officials 
and governed by a body of men who will look 
steadily to the public good. Such popular control, 
when secured by the extension of local govern- 
ment, will duly restrict and may ultimately end, 
a traffic which indisputably produces among our 
people a rank and noisome crop of poverty, misery, 
disease, and crime. The experience of Christian 
communities proves that, wherever laws prohibiting 
the sale of strong drink have the sanction of public 
opinion, and are faithfully administered by the execu- 
tive, not only have crime, lawlessness, and disorder 
been prevented, but peace, prosperity, education, 
and social well-being have been promoted. 

Take, again, the Sweating System as another of 
our social problems. 

It is one of the most repulsive phenomena that 
has been evolved out of the fierce competition of the 
existing state of things. A good deal of confusion 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 205 


hangs over the subject, and this will be dispelled 
by the committee of the House of Lords which 
has been appointed to inquire into the working of 
the system. What is wanted is an accurate, and 
if possible a statistical, picture of the trades where 
the invention of sweating has gained a footing. It 
is carried on principally in the tailoring trade, and 
the several departments of sewing and needlework 
among women. The sweater is the middleman 
who comes between the workmen and the em- 
ployer; he has often to supervise work that is 
unskilled and inferior, and where it is done in 
workshops he acts as the slavedriver, because 
much of the work done would be worthless if not 
subjected to his grinding supervision. The tide 
of life flows in from country districts to towns and 
cities. Cheap labour becomes plentiful as a con- 
sequence, and it is offered in such quantities as to 
have created the sweater and made him all- 
powerful. He becomes graded as the work is 
subdivided, and degraded as the work is sent out 
to be done in the back streets. Sometimes he has 
his.own workshop, or he apportions the work to 
sub-sweaters, and these distribute it again among 
the destitutes. The profits of the system at its 
extreme end are so miserable that the lowest and 


206 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


worst sweaters are said to make little more than a 
bare existence. But think of the many who are 
its victims ; think of all the competition, the crowd- 
ing,and the misery. It turns men and women into 
nothing better than mere machines. It is a fact 
that dirt, overcrowding, and neglect of sanitary 
precautions, are the common incidents of the 
sweating-shops, and it is out of such places that 
furniture and readymade cloth palaces stock their 
windows with bargains. The demon of cheapness 
possesses all ranks, and seldom do purchasers give 
a thought to the blood and muscle that are ground 
up to furnish them with cheap goods. Things are 
not cheap which we buy at the price of human 
health and happiness, by the destruction of human 
life; they are made costly beyond all reckoning. 
You remember Hood’s lines— 


“© men with sisters dear, 
O men with mothers and wives, 
It is not linen you are wearing out, 
But human creatures’ lives.” 


Sweating in its worst form is extensively carried 
on not only in London, but in Glasgow, and towns 
little suspected of it. A contract was taken in 
Glasgow by a sweater to have seven hundred men’s 
coats made for tenpence each. What did the actual 
makers earn per day at such work? Shirt-finishing, 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 207 


which includes making button - holes, sewing on 
buttons, and other details, is done at fourpence half- 
penny to sixpence per dozen, and only a very clever 
woman, working twelve, fifteen, or seventeen hours 
can do more than two dozen in a day. 

This particular social grievance only represents 
one phase of an evil in the existing state of things 
—an evil which dooms its victims to long hours of 
toil, and starvation wages after all. It is a part 
of that competitive anarchy which is so injurious 
to all classes. Every person who was willing to 
work had a right to live, and if the conditions are 
such that, work as hard as he might, he could not 
live out of his pay, then there 1s something wrong 
in the conditions, and it is the duty of Christian 
people to set it right. No set of men has any 
inherent right to profits arising out of the misery 
and degradation of others. The old doctrine of 
political economy needs revision, viz., that labour 
must be satisfied with the amount of wages capital 
could give. The public conscience, enlightened 
by Christianity, says, “No; you are beginning at 
the wrong end; under no conceivable circum- 
stances are starvation wages justifiable.” The 
first necessity of all is, that the labourer should 
have enough to keep body and soul together, and 


208 THE GOSPEL AND SOCITALISM— 


if anything is left after that, let capital have it. 
Labour has the first claim to the fruits of labour. 
Moses says, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that 
treadeth out the corn,’ and the labouring ox 
should have his mouth free, and a hearty meal 
while he was working. “The labourer is wortby 
of his hire.” The Christian Church ought not to 
rest until it has so reformed the conditions of 
labour all round, that it shall be impossible for 
iniquities like the sweating system to exist among 
us. 

Take, once more, the Better Housing of the Poor 
as another social problem. 

In labouring for the health and comfort of the 
poorer classes, the one great obstacle is found to 
be the insanitary condition of their abodes. A 
Royal Commission investigated this matter a few 
years ago, and disclosed an appalling state of things 
amongst a portion of the people in the large towns 
of this country. It showed too often wretched ac- 
commodation, high rents mercilessly exacted, total 
neglect by landlords of their duties to their tenants 
and of the general duties of property. A few facts 
will reveal this condition of things. Life in One 
Room, is the title of a pamphlet written by the © 
Medical Officer of Health for the City of Glasgow, 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 209 


and it informs us that 25 per cent. of the popula- 
tion live in single apartments, and 45 per cent. in 
two apartments; in other words, that 126,000 
persons live in those one-roomed, and 228,000 in 
those two-roomed houses. The writer goes on to 
say that he can only venture to lift a corner of the 
curtain which veils the life that is lived in these 
houses ; in fact, that it can only be pictured a little 
by the well-known passage in Carlyle’s Sartor 
Resartus: “Oh, under that hideous coverlit of 
vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, 
what a fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! 
The joyful and sorrowful are there: men are dying 
there, men are being born: men are praying. On 
the other side of a brick partition men are cursing : 
and around them all is the vast void night... , 
Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers 
hunger-stricken into its lair of straw. ... Riot 
cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank 
dens of shame; and the mother, with streaming 
hair, kneels over her pallid, dying infant, whose 
cracked lips only her tears now moisten. All these 
heaped and huddled together, with nothing but 
a little carpentry and masonry between them; 
crammed in like salted fish in their barrel; or 
weltering, shall I say, like an Eeyptian pitcher of 
O 


210 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above 
the others; such work goes on under that smoke- 
counterpane.” 

Some will say that these are the words of a 
screaming prophet, but let them gainsay, if they can, 
the words of that cool-headed statistician, Mr. R. 
Giffen, who speaks of the “‘residuum of five millions 
as a stain on our civilisation.” Another says : “To 
me, at least, it would be enough to condemn 
modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or 
serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry 
~ were to be that which we behold, that 90 per cent. 
of the actual producers of wealth have no home 
that they can call their own beyond the end of the 
week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room 
that belongs to them; have nothing of value of 
any kind except as much old furniture as will go 
in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly 
wages which barely suffice to keep them in health ; 


are housed for the most part in places that no man 


thinks fit for his horse ; are separated by so narrow _ 


a margin from destitution, that a month of bad 


trade, sickness, or unexpected loss, brings them — 
face to face with hunger and pauperism.” The — 
physical evils of overcrowding are great, but the — 


moral evils are greater still. And Lyon Playfair, 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 211 
eee 


an old sanitary reformer, said not long ago that the 
causes of deterioration in Scotland are more power- 
ful than the means of improving the social condition 
of the people. Physical and moral evils are bred of 
such social conditions as they live in. If they stew 
in closely packed dwellings, what can we expect to 
be the result? They can have few opportunities 
for healthy pleasures, and the public-house will be 
the only place where they can meet one another for 
good-fellowship. Misery drives to strong drink as 
well as strong drink to misery. If you take your 
children, put them into such hovels as are occupied 
by the poor, expose them to scenes of squalor, 
accustom them to profane and obscene talk, you 
know that most of them would turn out drunken, 
worthless men and women. But reverse the pro- 
cess, take the little wizened girls and little old men 
of boys that prowl in back courts away from such 
surroundings, give them plenty of food, treat them 
with kindness, teach them pure morals, and most 
of them would grow up to lead virtuous and useful] 
lives. 

Now, if such be largely the state of matters in 
town and country, then all who believe that the 
_ true being of the State is based upon the content- 
ment and prosperity of the greatest number of its 


212 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


citizens, must be concerned in bringing to an end a 
condition of things under which it is impossible for 
men to live decent Christian lives. ‘The solution 
of the social problems of the age,” it has been truly 
said, ‘is for us the doing of something here and 
now.” 

The better housing of the poor should be set 
about at once, that the bare decencies of life may 
no longer be outraged as they are at present in 
houses of one or two rooms, and that disease, 
drunkenness, and crime, so largely the result of 
unwholesome dwellings, may be to a great extent 
lessened. Houses, certified by the officer of health 
to be unfit for human habitation, should not be let 
or occupied. Philanthropic organisations exist in 
London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, for managing 
properties that can be made habitable, kept in 
thorough repair, and in a perfectly sanitary state, 
and yet yield five per cent. on capital invested. 
There is a Social Union in Edinburgh which under- 
takes this system, and thus explains it: ‘‘ Each 
property is bought in the name of the owner, who 
takes the entire risk, after having the report of a 
practical builder, and a careful statement from the 
superintendents as to rental and probable expenses. 


The rents are collected weekly, by ladies and t 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 213 


gentlemen who undertake this task as a means of 
gaining influence among the tenants, and helping 
them with their counsel and sympathy. The 
principle is maintained throughout of bettering 
the condition of the poor, not by lowering their 
expenditure on rent, which would merely tend to 
depress the rate of wages, but by giving them 
greater value for their money, and thus accustom- 
ing them to a higher standard of comfort.” The 
houses are let as cheaply as by former landlords, 
and are eagerly sought. Miss Octavia Hill has 
carried out this plan for years among the London 
poor, and recommends its wider adoption, saying, 
“Unite the loving-kindness of the friend to the 
control of the landlord, and whether by gradual 
improvement of court, or wise management of 
block, you will rule a kingdom in righteousness, and 
help to eradicate evil by slow but thorough ways.” 
Other effectual remedies must be put into operation. 
Local bodies should have the duty imposed upon 
them of acquiring and demolishing all premises 
that are distinctly insanitary and bad, and should 
erect buildings that are suitable for the class that 
would inhabit them. Such dwellings would belong 
to the people, because the town authorities are 
merely the representatives of the people, and 


214 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


administer the rates they raise for the people, and 
in owning the houses they would hold them in the 
name of the people, and the people would virtually 
become the owners of a large proportion of the 
houses which they occupy. It is to be hoped that 
new extensions of Local Government will lead to 
such improvements. Indeed, the solution must be 
deeper and wider still, for John Stuart Mill says 
with truth that “it is the great error of reformers 
and philanthropists in our time to nibble at the 
consequences of unjust power instead of redressing 
the injustice itself.” An easy transfer of lands and 
houses is one of the most beneficial reforms con- 
nected with the amenity of life among the people. 
In former days land belonged to the people equally, 
but now it has got unfortunately into a few hands, 
and the people are disinherited. If the primitive 
township had been not only retained, but developed 
to meet its growing wants, the land round about it 
would have been its own, and there would have 
been ample space over which to spread. According 
to the present system, when the trade of a town 
increases and the population needs housing, land 
rises to an exorbitant price, and the result is that — 
the working man has no garden, not even a decent- 
sized house, for which he must pay an enormous — 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 215 


rent. There must be a return to what all primi- 
tive communities regarded as a common right to 
the soil. Hvery township should be empowered to 
purchase or lease an ample stretch of ground, pay- 
ing the landlord a fair but not a fancy price for it, 
because property in land is recognised by us, and 
established by law; and on this ground people 
should have the right to build houses, and have a 
secure title without the absurd but expensive for- 
malities of conveyancing and title-deeds. In the 
local authority is furnished a perfect instrument for 
the registration and transfer of lands and houses, 
so that all you should have to do would be to go to 
the register office in the town or district, make an 
entry in a book, hand over the money for the land, 
and transact the business in five or ten minutes. 
No deeds would be necessary, nor expenses except 
a small fee to the registrar, and thus one of the 
oreat obstacles to the possession of land in small 
quantities by the people for building and other 
purposes would be completely swept away. Laws 
should be passed to enforce sanitary inspection and 
prevent it from being the farce it now is, and to 
enable the building of healthy houses, and provide 
plenty of recreation grounds in every town. 

Such are a few of the social grievances that con- 


216 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


stitute a scandal and menace in this our beloved 
land. Do they exist in our towns and villages? 
If we except the sweating system, it is no exaggera- 
tion to say that they appear among us in acute and 
shameful forms. Poverty hangs about the corners 
of the streets in rags ; drunkenness holds its carnival 
in drinking saloons every Saturday night; and 
miserable hovels of the poor abound in back 
quarters of our towns. There are citizens who 
think their towns to be no worse than other towns, 
and count it an offence to utter a disparaging word. 
It is possible to do like ostriches, bury our head in 
the sand, and see no danger. I daresay the men 
who of old made long prayers “reported that, on 
the whole, Jewish society was in a far more healthy 
state than in the days of the Maccabees, crimes 
fewer, poverty more scarce, and work more abund- 
ant,” and said hard things against the Prophet 
of Galilee for harping so much about the needs 
of the poor. It would be wise did some of these 
optimists in easy circumstances take a tour of 
inspection through the streets on a Saturday night, 
or visit the back-lands and closes any time, noon 
or night. We have slums and rookeries in country _ 
towns where hundreds of our population herd to- 
gether in single-roomed houses, in foul air and out 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 217 


of sight of nature, under conditions which render 
common decency impossible. We have drunkards 
to be a shame and a terror to the streets; we have 
brutes of men and women who crush out the happi- 
ness of home and send forth their offspring to be 
the pest of the community. There is clamant 
need to know these things, and deal with them. 
Let us break the ice of stagnation and selfishness 
that has frozen over the community as to this state 
of things. It is right to diagnose correctly our 
social diseases; it is a noble thing to gather all 
these up into our own spirit as a vicarious burden, 
and according to the light we have to discover and 
apply the healing balm. There is no hope for 
people held in the grip of poor, intemperate, and 
ill-housed conditions, ‘‘ unless the Church, which is 
the healing hand of Christ, becomes the motive 
power in society, directing our rulers to wise public 
measures, and stirring the hearts of individuals to 
private beneficence.” Let us know that we are 
partially responsible for every insanitary dwelling 
in the town. For part of true religion consists in 
honestly contemplating the misery that is not far 
off any of us, and looking at it through the com- 
passionate eyes of Jesus Christ. It consists also in 
securing laws which will absolutely prohibit social 


218 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


evils, and in electing to positions of authority men 
who will see those laws enforced. An old Greek 
once said, ‘‘I cannot play on any stringed instru- 
ment, but I can show you how out of a little village 
to make a great and glorious city.” I know not 
how he meant to do it; but this I know, that if 
with better social surroundings we could only bring 
Christ and His gospel nearer to the hearts of the 
men and women and children of our town, we 
might help to make it a part of the city of God. 
The socialist is wont to view these problems as 
exclusively material, and to work on for a change 
of conditions, for a better social environment, and 
is often bitterly disappointed with the result. ‘The 
Christian is wont to view these problems, again, as 
exclusively spiritual, and to work on for a change 
of character, for the soul’s conversion ; but he fails 
to recognise that the conditions in which multitudes 
are compelled to live are such as, whatever our 
natures are capable of, tend to brutalize us. There 
is a moral element in good housing, pure air, and 
open spaces, which ought not to be overlooked or 
despised. But let the Socialist and Christian be 
rolled into one—into the Christian Socialist ; then 
let him come to the feet of Jesus, and learn from 
Him the cure of social woes. Christ came to com- 


SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. 219 


bine the internal and external, to heal the bodies 
and souls of men. Spirit and matter co-existing 
in Him could and should be everywhere in happy 


accord. 
“Tnward evermore 
To outward,—so in life, and so in art, 
Which still is life.” 


It is part of His teaching, “ He that believeth 
on Me, the works that I do shall he do also.” The 
works that He did in the days of His humiliation 
were works of healing on the bodies of men, and 
these are still to be done by His followers, and Christ 
is still the spring of power there. “And greater 
works than these shall he do, because I go to the 
Father.” These greater works are conversions in 
the inner world of souls, and Christ is the spring of 
power there also. The faith that makes Christ 
ours, in a rich and co-operating community of 
action and of life, should give evidence of itself in 
blessed changes, alike of character and condition. 
From the congregation of pitiful hearts Christ 
draws round Himself, healing virtue for body and 
soul should go out through a thousand arts and 
appliances to the weary, sufferimg world. Christi- 
anity is called upon once more to show its title- 
deeds, and this claim of the age can only be 
answered when a sense of community with universal 


220 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM. 


suffering shall seize Christian hearts, and make 
their efforts widen out to the amelioration of 
social disorders. Let us find, then, our divinest 
duties in trying to improve the lot of the masses, 
in recognising the great moral value of a healthy 
material environment, and working for it. Let us 
do what we can to lessen poverty by substituting 
wise personal sympathy for doles of charity, to dry 
up the sources of vice, to abolish the destructive 
fierceness of competition, to create decent homes 
instead of hovels that breed disease, and make 
purity of life impossible ; and so give the conclusive 
answer to those who question the validity of our 
gospel, “Go your way, and tell John the things 
which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their 
sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, 
and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and 
to the poor the gospel is preached. And blessed 
is he who shall find none occasion of stumbling in 


Me.” 


IX, 


THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALISM—THE 
DISTRIBUTION OF WHALTH. 


A Ca.irornIAN recently left four millions to his 
heirs, yet with all his wealth he brought up his 
three sons to work. Did he do so to guard them 
against the perils of being rich idlers, or in obedience 
to the truth of the New Testament rule, “ This we 
command you, That if any would not work, neither 
should he eat”? If such had been his motive, it 
would have proved him to be a wise father ; but he 
gave another reason for doing so. He had closely 
observed the industrial classes both on his own 
continent and in Europe, and came to the conclusion 
that within twenty years property in the ordinary 
sense, as wealth independent of labour, would cease 
to exist in all civilised States. Whether that 
conviction be well founded or not, we do not 
pronounce ; we may say that it was rather hastily 
arrived at; but it is interesting because it puts 
forcibly a seminal thought now all in the air, and 


222 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


finding an entrance into many minds, that the 
inequality between rich and poor needs to be 
redressed, and that there ought to be a fairer 
distribution of the good things of life. Ideas 
about property are fermenting everywhere, and 
Christian teachers should be alive to their im- 
portance. ‘Tennyson represents his “ Northern 
Farmer” as a man with the words “ property, 
property, property,” ringing inside of him, while 
the parson makes a noise like a buzzard clock 
over his head in church. Too often the voice of 
the pulpit goes past like an empty sound, when 
it should speak to men’s business and bosom. 
Herbert Spencer complains that all he learns from 
the pulpit is to give a little to the poor. Such 
counsel, good enough in its way, does not go to 
the root of the matter. It is the Church’s duty 
to apply its gospel teaching to methods for the 
production and distribution of wealth. Among 
the most thoughtful adherents of socialism it is 
held that the cardinal principle behind all phases 
of their movement is an economic one, and that it 
is a general movement of the age, not likely to be 
arrested till it end in the distribution by the 
community of all wealth, according to its ideas of 


justice and equity, for the general good. Now, 


Pe ee, ee ee 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 224 


there is such a thing as Christian economics; a 
close relation exists between political economy and 
religious ideas. Christian principles should be 
extended and translated into economical facts, as 
they once were, by the abolition of slavery, into 
social facts. Were this secured, social and econo- 
mical improvement would be promoted. The 
gospel alone reconciles the antagonism of classes 
by filing men’s hearts with a sense of justice, 
brotherhood, and mutual help. A more vital 
Christianity in its social aspects would heal the 
distempers and remove the inequalities of our 
present state. 

On every side the conviction is rising into 
strength, that we are a long way off yet from the 
arrangement of society on principles of strict 
fairness, and on every side aspirations for a better 
construction of society are expressed. Men like 
Canon Westcott tell us that the problems which 
the coming generation will have to face are 
problems of wealth and poverty, of luxury and 
want, of capital and labour, and that they cannot 
be solved irrespectively of the Christian faith. 
Many in the community are thinking about 
problems of social politics, though not clearly, and 


therefore with some measure of alarm; leading 


224 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


statesmen declare that the published programme of 
such a man as John Burns, the champion of the 
London strikers, could, with the exception of an 
eight hours bill, be endorsed by the Liberal party 
as a whole; candidates for parliamentary honours 
are carrying the constituencies everywhere on 
advanced social programmes, and confirming the 
inference that, as many social schemes and theories 
have been wrought out by past governors of the 
country in their interests, so larger measures will 
be wrought out by future governors of the country, 
and in a more rapid and thorough way, for the 
public good; the ranks of ‘ Christian Socialism ” 
increase In number and strength, as inquirers find 
that it abjures the policy of plunder, and exchanges 
the old ery of “ Down with everything that is up,” 
for the new and better one, ‘‘ Up with everything 
that is down.” 
It is felt by many who try to grapple with social 
orievances that they must go a long way in the 
spirit of reform, and adopt something else than 
ordinary cures and temporary palliatives. In a 
little book on Practicable Socialism, by the Rey. 
and Mrs. Samuel Barnet of East London, he says : 
‘“‘ Some time ago I met in a tramcar a well-known 
American clergyman. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘ten years, 


- ail 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 225 


ne 


work as a minister at large made me a Christian 
socialist. The remark illustrates my experience. 
Ten years ago my wife and I came to East London. 
The study of political economy and some familiarity 
with the poor had shown us the harm of doles, 
given in the shape either of charity or outdoor 
relief, We found that gifts so given did not make 
the poor any richer, but served rather to perpetuate 
poverty.” Charitable and philanthropic efforts do 
not touch the bottom of our social disorders, he 
confesses, and says that attention must be turned 
to the problem of the distribution of wealth. 
Inquiry into causes, and application of remedies, 
alike throw us back on present economic and 
industrial relations. The older political economy 
concerned itself chiefly with the production and 
accumulation of wealth, and sought to lay the 
foundations of a science and art of commerce, 
considering labour as a commodity; the newer 
economy regards chiefly the welfare of the working 
classes, and turns its attention to the proper use 
and distribution of wealth. The laws, neither of 
the one nor of the other, should be spoken of as if 
they were laws of nature—the doctrine of ladssez- 
Jore having been upset by much of recent 
legislation ; they are sete a department of social 


226 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM — 


ethics, whose data vary from age to age, and have 
different bearings in different countries and at 
different epochs. 

How, then, shall a larger sharé of wealth go to 
relieve the masses of mankind, and make common 
among them the good things confined to the few ? 
There can be no doubt that great progress in the 
comfort and well-being of the people has taken 
place under the present industrial system during 
the last sixty or seventy years. Before that 
period the working classes of this country had low 
wages, few comforts of life, and could not lay by 
savings for their old age. Wages might be still 
higher than they are, but they have increased 
fifty per cent. during the last seventy years, and 
the working man has shorter hours of labour, 
giving less work in return as to time, though not 
as to effect. The skilled artisan gets better 
remuneration for his labour, as it improves in 
quality ; while improvements in machinery have 
greatly reduced the price of commodities, enabling 
common labourers to buy sixty-six per cent., factory 
operatives seventy-eight per cent., and skilled 
mechanics ninety per cent. more of the necessaries — 
of life with a single day’s wage. Machinery, by 


displacing labour, at the first seems cruel to the 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 227 


a 


working man, and does occasion individual hard- 
ship for a while; but by devolving upon brute 
power that does not suffer the most oppressive 
part of labour, it proves an enormous blessing to 
the mass of the population, by lowering the cost of 
production and furnishing cheap articles to the 
whole community. Much has also been done by 
combination of workmen to give value to their 
labour in the market. Masters could combine as 
much as they liked, but workmen could not. lay 
their heads together, and make common cause. 
This right has been won, however, and it enables 
them to do much for themselves in securing a fair 
remuneration for their labour. Seventy years ago 
there were savings banks, confined, however, almost 
to one class, the class of domestic servants; now 
in post office savings banks, only six-and-twenty 
years in existence, there are sixty millions of the 
people's money, while the friendly societies that 
provide against sickness and death show what 
means and resources the people have and can lay 
up for themselves by carefulness and forethought. 
Do not these benefits of the present order con- 
tain a record greatly to commend it, and prove 
_ what not a few wise men teach, that the interests 
of capital and labour are not antagonistic, but 


228 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


identical, and their blessings mutual? We have 
not the whole problem before us, when we confine 
our gaze to this picture. There are great and 
orievous features of the existing system which 
wise men of all schools and parties regard as 
inherent characteristics of that system. Canon 
Westcott thus writes in his book on Social Aspects 
of Christiamty: “We are suffering on all sides, 
and we know that we are suffering, from a tyran- 
nical individualism. This reveals itself in social 
life by the pursuit of personal pleasure; in com- 
mercial life by the admission of the principle of 
unlimited competition; in our theories of life by 
the acceptance of material standards of prosperity 
and progress. Nor is it difficult to see why this 
should be so. The silent revolution which has 
taken place within the century in the methods of 
production and distribution has terribly intensified 
the evils which belong to all late forms of civilisa- 
tion. The great industries have cheapened luxuries 
and stimulated the passion for them. They have 
destroyed the human fellowship of craftsman and 
chief. They have degraded trade, in a large 
degree, into speculation. They have deprived 
labour of its thoughtful freedom, and turned men 
into ‘hands.’ They have given capital a power of 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 229 
etree ee eS 
dominion and growth perilous above all to its 


possessor.” Such is the indictment of a thoughtful 
observer and great Christian scholar, and hardly 
any socialist could put it stronger against the 
industrial system of our era. This grave problem 
of the distribution of wealth, we are told on every 
side, is an economic one, and its solution must be 
found in some modification or change of economic 
method. It has been the tendency of the present 
system to become a great profit-grinding machine, 
in which those who are weak go to the wall, and 
those who are strong get a lion’s share of the spoil. 
It has tended to enrich the few and impoverish the 
many, to give the privileged few power to exact 
as large a profit as they can, irrespective of the 
condition of the men who make the profit. The 
annual income of the country is estimated at about 
1250 millions, of which 450 millions go to satisfy 
the claims of land and capital, 350 millions 20 to 
those above the manual labour class, and 450 
millions go to the manual labourers, or three-fifths 
of the working population. About 10 millions of 
the population receive annually the sum of 800 
millions, while 450 millions are allotted to 25 


_. millions of the manual labour class. It appears, 


then, that an enormous share is taken from the 


230 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


produce of the nation by possessors of the instru- 
ments of industry, which leads to the small in- 
comes of the workers, and renders it impossible for 
them to command the means of culture and happi- 
ness which they ought to have. Adam Smith has 
shown that labour is the only source of wealth, 
and without labour no wealth whatever can be 
produced, and yet the toiling millions who make 
that wealth are comparatively poor. Many of 
them live on the verge of starvation, while a few 
monopolists pile up huge fortunes, and large 
numbers have more than they can use. The 
contrast between wealth and poverty has always 
been observed, but it is phenomenal in our day. 
Plato said that in every city there were, face to 
face, two hostile classes, the rich and the poor; 
and Lord Beaconsfield says that the unequal dis- 
tribution of the fruits of industry divides us into 
“two nations,’ who differ widely from each other 
in security, education, and comfort. So long ago 
as 1843, Mr. Gladstone said in the House of 
Commons: “It is one of the most melancholy 
features in the social state of our country that a 
constant accumulation of wealth in the upper 
classes, and an increase of the luxuriousness of 
living, should be accompanied by a decrease in the — 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 231 


consuming powers of the people, and an increase 
of the pressure of privation and distress among the 
poorer classes.” Although production has been 
stimulated beyond measure, and aided by immense 
supplies of food from abroad, the golden age of 
plenty seems as far away from the labourer as ever, 
and he has still to wage a constant war against 
penury and want. And there is another war—a 
war of suspicion and discontent between the “ two 
nations ;” that antagonism between the classes and 
the masses, between the Haves and the Have-nots, 
so deep-seated as to be a continual menace to peace 
and prosperity, and so grievous that, according to 
the Bishop of Rochester, “the zones of enormous 
wealth and degrading poverty, unless carefully 
considered, will presently generate a tornado which, 
when the storm clears, may leave a good deal of 
wreckage behind.” No system which results in a 
few millionaires at one end of the scale, and a 
million of paupers at the other, can be regarded by 
any man as fair or desirable ; and a sense of justice 
which, as Chauteaubriand says, is “the bread of 
nations,” unites with the dictates of prudence and 
the promptings of philanthropy in a desire to 
obtain for the labourers a larger share in the fruits 
of their labour. How comes it to pass that, with 


232 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


such triumphs of mechanical contrivance and such 
unexampled wealth and prosperity, so many of the 
workers are reduced to the bare necessaries of life ? 
How is it that Great Britain, which weaves cloth 
enough to put a girdle round the globe, should 
have multitudes of ill-clad men, women, and 
children? Is it because labour does not produce 
enough? Never were the powers of production so 
stupendous. Is it due to existing economic con- 
ditions? According to many, the present order is 
credited with the enormous accumulations of wealth 
in this country, and therefore is regarded as some- 
thing sacred, as a law of nature, and the foundation 
of our national supremacy in the paths of com- 
merce. ‘The doctrine of lawssez-faire has full swing 
in all departments, and good service did it render 
when restraints of the severest kind were swept 
away, and freedom of trade was secured. It is the 
doctrine of “let alone.” ‘‘ Leave things to them- 
selves; let them go on as they are doing. Give 
full scope to individual interest and enterprise. 
Let there be full liberty, and the economic laws 
will operate like laws of nature.” Such was the 
contention of the old political economy, and the 
contention has been so far made good by the 
marvellous development of industry and opulence | 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 233 


that has followed. But the doctrine of lazssez-favre 
is not the whole truth. Granting that it has been 
the condition, or even the cause, of our commercial 
greatness, it has only succeeded in solving the 
problem of the production of wealth, but affords no 
aid in solving the problem of the distribution of 
wealth. It is possible, on examination, to discover 
that it may have helped the present crisis of 
deepening poverty surrounded by the abundant 
wealth which labour has created. For existing 
economic methods are not to be regarded either as 
laws of nature or as practically the same through- 
out the ages. They are human and social arrange- 
ments, only fixed and normal as they are based on 
the eternal law of righteousness. ‘They are a 
phase in the evolution of society more or less 
permanent, and may be destined to pass away 
before some larger and nobler readjustment. 

The industrial system that prevails is compara- 
tively a thing of yesterday. It did not exist a few 
centuries ago. Sociologists point out a number of 
stages in the progress of society. There was a 
period when no private possession of land existed, 
when original ownership belonged to the tribe or 
the community. The Jewish people, and not any 
private class, were owners of the Holy Land, and 


234 THE GOSPEL AND SOCTALISM— 


every jubilee restitution of the soil was made to 
the tribes. The prophet Isaiah knows nothing 
about land laws, but teaches that God made the 
land not to feed the pride of the few, but the natural 
hunger of the many, and pronounces “woe unto 
them that join house to house, and lay field to 
field.” In India, China, and Japan, the land 
belongs to the people. During the middle ages, 
under the feudal system, slavery had been super- 
seded by serfdom as the form of labour. The serf 
was bound to the soil, and had a rough, poor 
existence, though he was not much worse off than 
his lord in castle hall; but he had a fixed interest 
in the soil, and there was something of comrade- 
ship between him and his lord. In industrial 
pursuits, each craft had its guild, and the relations 
between master and workmen were still more 
personal and friendly. For a long period no great 
division between classes existed, and the master 
worked with his men, lived with them, and the 
workmen who gathered a little capital easily rose 
to the position of masters. At that time appren- 
tice, journeyman, and master described the three 
stages in the career of a worker. With the down- 
fall of feudalism a change in the tenure of land was 
introduced, and the people were driven from the 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 235 


soil, and were either driven into the towns, or 
reduced to service with low wages and restraints 
on their freedom. The people were disinherited 
by a system of private ownership of land. About 
the middle of last century the present commercial- 
ism came into vogue. It began with the invention 
of the spinning-jenny by Hargreave, of the spin- 
ning-machine by Arkwright, and of the steam- 
engine by Watt, all within twelve years of each 
other; and they have given rise to the greatest 
revolution in industry the world has known—a 
revolution that has won supremacy for England in 
all the markets of the world. At the same time, 
however, this industrial system, under one-sided 
economic conditions, has led to the concentration 
of wealth in a few hands and the divorce of the 
workers from the instruments of production. ‘The 
spoils of labour have gone to a privileged order, 
and those who labour do not get the remuneration 
they deserve. They have been disestablished and 
disendowed of their proper reward by an imperfect 
economic arrangement, whereby labour is bought 
in the market for wages, and the wages are deter- 
mined not so much by the amount or value of the 
work as by its scarcity or plenty. Cobden ex- 
plained the condition of wages in a single sentence : 


236 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


“When two men ask work from one employer, 
wages are low; when two employers are after one 
man, wages are high.” Where abundance of labour 
is found, this iron law sends down wages to a bare 
subsistence, and causes that most disheartening 
and demoralising of all material evils—insecurity 
in the means of living. 

The present industrial order is founded on 
Individualism as opposed to Socralesm. 

To the Reformation we owe an assertion of the 
freedom and independence of the individual, and, 
when fairly recognised, it is a noble right; in a 
one-sided and exaggerated form it is a marked 
feature of this industrial era, and gives to it the 
name of Individualism. The policy which it pur- 
sues is that of “let alone;” its economic law is 
said to operate, like the laws of nature, with un- 
varying and necessary sequence. ‘“‘ Leave things to 
work of themselves, and all will come right.” It 
is the Darwinian law of “struggle for existence” 
carried up into the economic world; it is the sur- 
vival of the fittest, and the fittest are the strongest, 
and the strongest are those best armed to win the 
day. Down in the lower world it meant the strong 
snatching food from the weak, the fierce clearing 
the field so effectively as to leave nothing for the 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 237 


rest; it meant the ichthyosaurs preying on the 
smaller denizens of the waters and the big mam- 
moths goring their rivals to death. Something of 
this kind marks the industrial world: here the 
strongest succeed, the men of best physique, the 
most intelligent and sagacious, it may be also the 
most cunning and unscrupulous; here the best 
armed vanquish, the men of largest material advan- 
tages and greatest hereditary wealth. The result 
is that a few powerful individuals monopolise the 
instruments of production, have an autocratic con- 
trol of industries, and obtain the lion’s share of the 
spoils. While the individualism of the one is 
exaggerated, the individuality of the many suffers 
loss. By the divorce of the workers from raw 
materials and implements of work, they are reduced 
to a dependent, helpless, and precarious mode of 
life. They have freedom, but lack security. 
Freedom consists in offering his labour at a dis- 
count, and in dying of hunger if his labour is not 
wanted. Freedom of contract: what is it without 
capital but just to accept whatever conditions may 
be imposed? Freedom of labour: what is it except 
the competition of labour, and a reduction of wages 
to the lowest point ? 

Now if Malthus, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer 


238 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


be the apostles of individualism, and say that for 
the weak and oppressed there is no cover at the 
banquet of life, Christianity, in the name of justice 
and brotherhood, protests against this state of 
things, holds out a hand to the weak, and indicates 
a place for the oppressed. That the weak should 
give place to the strong may be the ethic of nature, 
but it is the ethic neither of human nature nor of 
Christ. The ethic of Christ is that the strong 
should help the weak, and the fit-to-live should 
make the unfit fit to live. He asserts the proper 
individuality and inherent worth of every man; 
but while His gospel is individualistic, still more 
is it socialistic. He preached a social gospel; He 
proclaimed the social law of God. And socialism 
in its best form claims to be an application of 
Christ’s ethical teaching to the entire social and 
economic order, an application that will develop 
true individuality all round, and not ignore it 
anywhere. It is often charged with attempting to 
abolish the institution of property, and tending to 
crush out all individuality, but it seeks to do the 
reverse. “Instead of taking away property from 
everybody, it will enable everybody to acquire 
property. It will truly sanctify the institution of 
individual ownership by placing property on an 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 239 


unimpeachable basis, that of being the result of 
one’s individual exertions. Thereby it will afford 
the very mightiest stimulus for individuality to 
unfold itself. Property will belong to its possessor 
by the strongest of all titles, to be enjoyed as he 
thinks proper, but not to be used as an instrument 
of fleecing his fellow-citizens.” 

The present industrial order is founded on Self 
mterest as opposed to Self-sacrifice. 

“‘Qne’s own interest,” says the old school of 
economy, “is the main and rightful moving 
principle, of which we ought not to let sentimental 
moralists make us ashamed ;” and the defence it 
used to make was, that the laws of the market 
which individual interest generates would tend 
best to the universal benefit. Experience has not 
proved this, and surely for every one to seek only 
his own interest cannot secure general welfare. 
Count Tolstoi, in one of his works, illustrates the 
present situation. ‘‘ People come to a farm ; they 
find there all that is necessary to sustain life, a 
house well furnished, barns filled with grain, store- 
rooms well provisioned, implements of husbandry, 
horses and cattle —in a word, all that is needed 
for a life of comfort and ease. Each wishes to 
profit by this abundance, but each for himself, 


240 THE GOSPEL‘ AND SOGIATISM— 


without thinking of others ; each wants the whole 
for himself. Then begins a veritable pillage ; they 
fight for the possession of the spoils; they grasp 
more than they can consume. No one is able 
to sit down to the tranquil enjoyment of what he 
has, lest another take away the spoils. All these 
people leave the farm, bruised and famished. 
Thereupon the master puts things to rights, stocks 
the farm again, and another group of seekers 
comes to do as before. The good master still 
provides all that is needed to sustain life, and the 
same thing occurs over and over again. A wise 
man comes to the farm—none other than God in 
person—and tells them, as everything is in abund- 
ance, to act reasonably, and instead of robbing 
each other to help one another. If they will work, 
plant, and care for one another, every one will be 
satisfied. But the many will not believe the wise 
man or follow his advice, and continue the policy 
of self-interest, might and main.” There isa higher 
principle, when you come to man, than the law of 
natural selection, whose keynote is, “ Let the strong 
trample out the weak,” and its keynote is, “ Let 
the strong sacrifice themselves for the weak.” 
The law of the cross, which is the law of ministra- 
tion, of sympathy, of self-sacrifice, is the teaching 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 241 


of One who “being in the form of God,” made 
Himself of no reputation, and took upon Himself 
the form of a servant, to raise our lives to His own 
level. His gospel holds up to our eyes an ideal 
of social order as the kingdom of heaven, which is 
meant to teach the power of social relationships 
and social obligations in the whole life of man—in 
commerce, politics, and religion. It is said that 
the doctrine of Christian ethics cannot be applied 
to human life as it now is—that however desirable, 
it is not practicable. The Bishop of Peterborough 
said lately that it was impossible to construct 
society on the law of the Sermon on the Mount. 
It is a sad confession for a spiritual peer of the 
realm to make in this year of his Lord and ours. 
It is a comfort to know that Mr. Cobden declared 
his politics to be the politics of the Sermon on the 
Mount. Ifyou push the principle of self-interest, 
pure and simple, and make it supreme over the 
life of a being capable of self-sacrifice, you only 
degrade him to the level of the world beneath, 
and arrest at a blow his highest step of progress. 
The present industrialism has so trampled on the 
_ Interests of others, and gone to such excesses in 

the degradation of the workers, that Factory Acts 


and numerous measures of State-control have been 
Q 


242 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


required to keep it in check. It needs to be 
moralised as well as to be socialised; it needs to 
be made subservient to moral law; it should be 
placed on a basis of justice, brotherhood, and regard 
for the public good. Business to-day is wrong. 
It rests on the negation of social law and self- 
sacrifice; it is the exact opposite of Christianity, 
which says, “ Let no man seek his own, but each 
his neighbour’s good.” There is a higher ideal in 
life than that of getting on, and being first in the 
race for wealth. The desire for huge accumula- 
tions is a survival from the lower world. It is 
nobler for the strong and wealthy to sacrifice 
themselves for the weak, and not only pour out of 
their coffers what may be needed for those in 
want, but unite so to arrange the economic 
resources of the nation that every man shall have 
access to all the common privileges which make life 
worth living — health, education, leisure, culture, 
plenty for every individual—all of which go to 
make a great and happy nation. 

The present industrial order is founded on 
Competition as opposed to Co-operation. 

Individualism, self-interest; competition—these 
three mark our existing commercial position, and 


under the name of private enterprise reign 


eS ee 


ee ee a, 


ad ge eh ek cal it 


isan 


a on ee 


ie ao Fe 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 243 
ee a a 


supreme. The success of the competitive system 
depends on cheap labour and improved machinery, 
and of both it may be said to have a plentiful 
supply. It is a necessity of the system that wages 
be lowered as much as possible. Competition com- 
pels the employer to get his labour-force at cost 
price —at subsistence wages. It is necessary to 
diminish the cost of production and save the margin 
of profit. In this way it leads to the degradation of 
labour. The worker is exploited and enslaved by 
the system which regards him as a machine. It is 
not the fault of the individual capitalist. He may 
be a kind and honourable man, and would sacrifice 
much to benefit the workers; but he cannot help 
himself. It is often a matter of life and death to 
him. It is the vice of the system. Cattle are 
counted by heads, but workers are counted only 
by hands. <A pity it is that God did not make 
them only hands, but they have wills and 
consciences too, that bid them rebel against such 
subjection, and demand more equitable treatment. 
Hence the chronic war between capital and labour, 
ever appealing to the costly and dangerous arbitra- 
ment of strikes and lockouts, Much may be done 
to mitigate the fierceness of the conflict. Trades 
unions have enabled the workers to hold their own 


244 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


against an unfair system, but at best they only 
“ secure a working truce and not a permanent peace.” 
The wise generosity of masters has also done much 
to soften the harshness and tone down the discord 
which exists. Christianity, even under a wrong 
system, counsels wise moderation, and when trade 
improves, advises the employers to be generous in 
allowing to those whom they employ a full share 
of the improvement, and when trade declines it 
advises the workmen to be moderate. The 
struggle thus varies in form, and may be modified 
by kindly and considerate dealing, but it remains 
essentially the same in economic character. 

Not only does the competitive system divide 
employer and employed, but among the employers 
themselves it creates a struggle so fierce as to be 
a kind of internecine war. The smaller employers 
in almost every department of industry have been 
displaced by the greater; they have been driven 
from the field, or compelled to seek work in the 
establishment that has superseded them. So keen 
is the competition that the margin of profit has 
become extremely small, and the competitors have 
to put forth all their wits and efforts to outflank 


and undersell one another; the hand of the one is | 


against the other, and no foe is more terrible than | 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 245 


the one who runs a neck-to-neck race with the 
other every day. The evils of competition have 
thus been summarised: it “gluts our markets, 
enables the rich to take advantage of the necessities 
of the poor, makes each man snatch the bread out 
of his neighbour's mouth, converts a nation of 
brethren into a mass of hostile, isolated units, and 
finally involves capitalists and labourers in one 
common ruin.”? 

Since the pressure of work lies with increasing 
weight upon the worker, and competition oTOws 
keener every year, with its evils aggravated as a 
natural result, the question arises: Can no system 
be devised or principle conceived to check this 
social anarchy, and introduce a more equitable 
condition of things? Capitalists and labourers 
are alike held in the grip of a competitive and 
tyrannous Individualism ; we are all caught in its 
toils. Then should we not all, in a spirit of self- 
sacrifice and love for the public good, unite to 
consider any method which would make more 
common the good things which wealth has gained 
for the few? Our present system needs not only 
to be socialised and moralised, but likewise to be 
nationalised. Reformers of every school perceive 


1 Greg. 


246 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


that this, with greater or less scope, must be their 
object. Such an aim inspires not only the Christian 
philanthropist and the socialistic propagandist, but 
every man who wants to see a great and prosperous 
people. A reconstruction of society in which there 
shall be no churlish rich and no discontented poor, 
in which the desire of every one is ‘‘Give me 
neither poverty nor riches,’ in which there 1s 
neither too little nor too much, but enough for 
each of work and leisure and enjoyment—such is 
the Christian and social ideal. Better to strive 
after that worthily, and fail in the effort, than die 
a millionaire. 

To secure such an object, the system that 
prevails must be modified or changed. Business 
must be founded on social principle. Co-opera- 
tion must take the place of competition ; we must 
have a system of industry carried on, not for 
private profits, but for the public good. Christian- 
ity should be applied to the social order. Instead 
of the gospel of individual push, let us have the 
gospel of mutual help. Instead of this private and 
disorderly scramble for gold, let us seek the 


honourable distinction of striving to promote 


every man another's wealth. 
We are all agreed up to this point. With the 


—__ 


Se ee ee 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 247 


Christian ideal of social order in our hearts, and in 
sight of the economic world ruled by a hard law 
of competition, which is the brute struggle for 
existence, we are sure that co-operation for exist- 
ence must be so much higher and better. Lord 
Derby spoke lately to the Rochdale Chamber of 
Commerce, and said that the co-operative system, 
which had already achieved so remarkable a 
success, was in his judgment a better remedy than 
any yet proposed for what he called the great and 
threatening evil which is upon us—the chronic 
war between capital and labour. Rochdale is 
the birthplace of the co-operative movement, 
for it began there in 1844 with twenty-eight 
poor weavers, and now has about a million 
members. It has made rapid progress in France, 
Germany, Italy, and Belgium. Many look to it 
as the equitable method, under wider applications, 
for transforming the entire field of industry. 
There can be no doubt that the co-operative plan 
has been a great success as a distributive enter- 
prise, but in the productive line one must sor- 
rowfully confess that its efforts have not been 
encouraging, nor are its remedial prospects bright. 
The advantages of co-operative societies in this 
direction have not been positively shown to be 


248 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


either great or lasting. Two great obstacles stand 
in the way. Co-operation is handicapped on all 
sides by having to make its way in a society based 
on competition, and having a monopoly of capital. 
For production under the present system a larger 
capital is needed than workers have at command, 
and where they depend on borrowed money, it is 
too often suddenly withdrawn in times of panic. 
Still further, syndicates of workmen have not shown 
themselves better at handling the means of pro- 
duction than individualists. They may be men 
perfectly honest, but not capable in point of 
intelligence or organising efficiency. Or they may 
have capable men in the management of business, 
but not honest, who fatten themselves on the 
profits. 

In face of these difficulties, many are coming to 
think that an economic change of a more thorough 
kind is requisite—that the means of production 
should somehow be placed under social and public 
control, with the view of obtaining a fair partici- 
pation in the fruits of labour for the whole com- 
munity. ‘* Now, it is the contention of socialism 
that, in the evolution of society, a period has come 
requiring the transition into a higher and wider 
form of organisation, economical, social, and 


ee ee) ee ee ee) ee et ee 


fc teNer ig Banal hj oy 


LHe DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 249 


political; a society embodying a nobler ethical 
ideal, a free democracy with a fit and suitable 
industrial system; a form of society which will 
better adapt the mechanical achievements of the 
industrial revolution to the service of man, for 
the wider extension of freedom, happiness, and 


culture.” ? 


The socialistic programme has been 
thought out by men of keen intellects, such as 
Karl Marx and Lasalle on the Continent, and John 
S. Mill in this country, who says: “The form of 
association which, if mankind continue to improve, 
must be expected in the end to predominate, is 
not that which can exist between a capitalist as 
chief and workpeople without a voice in the 
management, but the association of the labourers 
themselves on terms of equality, collectively own- 
ing the capital with which they carry on their 
operations, and working under managers elected 
and removable by themselves.” In its best aim, 
socialism means a wise use of the forces of all for 
the good of each, and the legal protection of the 
weak against the strong; and to secure this aim it 
proposes an economic change that shall put land 
and capital under collective ownership and control. 
It maintains that land and all the resources of the 


1 Kirkup’s Inquiry into Socialism. 


250 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


earth, should be held as the gift of God equally to 
all His children, and that capital and all means of 
industry should be managed in some way by the 
community as a whole, and operated for the public 
good in all its parts. Under this system property 
would not be abolished, but the nation would 
become sole landlord and capitalist. There would 
be no private property in the means of production, 
but only in the means of enjoyment. Each would 
have awarded to him the full fruits of his labour, 
and according to the work done. If this régume of 
collective ownership and production were carried 
out, the plutocracy and proletariat would disappear, 
and with them the capitalist and wage-earning 
classes, and all the painful contrasts between 
wealth and poverty. 

Such is the socialist programme, and when such 
immense changes of the industrial and social 
structure are mentioned, we lift up our hands in 
amazement, and ask how these things can be. 
Many who acknowledge the enormous accumula- 
tion of capital in a few hands to be unfair, would 
rather submit to it as a necessary evil, beyond 
prevention, than commit themselves to this collec- 
tive programme. They discard it as an optimist 
illusion, a dream of Utopia; however desirable, 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 251 


yet utterly impracticable. I do not commit myself 
to such a proposal; but as a Christian, hoping for 
a divine society to be founded on self-sacrifice and 
the brotherhood of man, I claim to be perfectly 
open-minded, and decline to be much moved by 
old cries of illusion and impracticability. All 
great reforms have had to face that cannonade. 
If the assumption and administration of land and 
capital by the State or the community, or both, 
be against human nature, then such a plan will 
come to naught. If it does not preserve all the 
good points of the private competitive system—if 
it ignores the original inequality of human gifts, 
and the variety of personal aptitudes, and the 
incentives to individual effort, then it has not a 
chance of success. The main objection against it 
is, that the attempt to carry it out could only 
produce convulsion and disaster. Now, were such 
to be the result, that would be a fatal difficulty. 
There must be no violence, no confiscation, no 
revolution, even though the land may have to be 
nationalised, and a competitive system give way 
to a co-operative commonwealth. But the wisest 
heads among socialists are ceasing to be anarchists, 
and along with them many Christian and social 


reformers are beginning to see a more excellent 


252 THE GOSPEL AND SOGIALISM— 


way to the equal distribution of the fruits of 
industry. We do not believe in revolution so 
much as in evolution. In the early days of 
geology, there were students who thought all 
changes to be cataclysmal and volcanic, but in 
course of time the school of uniformists rose up, 
and demonstrated that those changes were due 
to the constant action of the ordinary forces of 
nature. In like manner we say that the revolu- 
tionary aim—that of sudden cataclysms and social 
upheavals—is not the right method, and would 
only be destructive. I do not believe in short 
cuts to the millennium. Society cannot be trans- 
formed by a few bold strokes of the magician’s 
wand. The transformation can only come in 
obedience to slow processes of social growth. 
Kvolution—that great word of modern science— 
must hold here, and win the day. If the aim of 
socialism come through the evolution of society, 
then you can no more stop it than Canute could 
stop the wave. Those who believe in going 
forward by reform, and not by revolution, differ 
in their estimate of the time required to change 
the existing régime. Rodbertus thought it would 
take five centuries, Lasalle said two, and a very 
remarkable book, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 253 


pictures the new social order in full force at the 
close of the twentieth century. The conditions of 
social life vary from age to age. The present 
industrial system is but of yesterday, and may 
be gone in less time than it has taken to grow up. 
And there are forces at work and dominant to 
make it evident that the existing is not a normal 
and permanent order—not an organic system at 
all, but a transitional stage of development, a 
preparation for some higher and better order. 
The whole drift of events is towards a new 
economic, industrial, and social régime. The 
political question is settled ; we have democracy. 
The social question remains, and the rise of 
democracy makes its solution simple and near. 
Politically, the working classes are our masters, 
our rulers; industrially, they are dependants, 
They have the power of choosing legislators and 
making laws, while they have no property, and 
their wages are kept low and insecure by a 
tyrannous competition. With the progress of 
democracy it is not difficult to foresee that this 
irritation cannot continue, and that there will be 
ereater equality. As the workers are better 
educated and organised, great changes of a social 
and economic order will take place. The school- 


254 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


master is abroad ; free education has been granted; 
in another generation we shall have an under- 
standing people, more intelligent to know the 
evils of society, and better acquainted with their 
rights. The workers are better organised. ‘Trades 
unions have succeeded in raising wages, and pro- 
curing the great boon of a nine hours working 
day; they aim at uniting the workers into one 
compact, comprehensive body; and what many 
have desired for years, the free and voluntary 
organisation of labour, has been seen in this year 
of grace, when skilled labour threw itself heart 
and soul into the ranks of unskilled labour. Such 
combinations, along with the great friendly 
societies, diffuse among the members a_ sense 
that their interests are mutual, and so they be- 
come powerful instruments in preparing for future 
industrial changes. Lord Bramwell put the social 
question in a nutshell when he said, ‘“‘ When men 
are as honest as bees, we may have socialism—not 
till then.” But organisation of labour, all along 
the lines, will teach the workmen the highest 
experience and skill, concentration of power, real 
and efficient control, a national aim and spirit, and 
far more true responsibility. 

Other great tendencies towards a new order are _ 


THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 255 


among us, at work under our eyes. There is at 
present a great movement in favour of the State 
undertaking duties from which it has hitherto held 
aloof. It began with the factory legislation, 
initiated by Lord Shaftesbury fifty years ago, to 
curb the insatiate greed of manufacturers, and its 
progress towards increased activity has continued 
ever since. ‘The purpose to use the power of the 
State for the good of the vast majority of the 
people, is a great factor of our epoch. The 
doctrine of laissez-faire got knocked on the head 
when the post office and telegraph, mining and 
factory, and other industrial operations were 
placed under national control. The State has 
also taken in charge the education of the young. 
In some countries the railways have been assumed, 
and provision made against accidents and want in 
old age. One social activity after another has 
been concentrated by the State, till some begin to 
fear that this evolution of things may transform 
every citizen into a grown-up baby, and destroy 
that spirit of self-reliance needed to make a great 
people. This centvralising tendency need not be 
feared, however, and is likely to go on absorbing 
railways and other great industries. It need not 
be feared, because another process of devolution 


256 THE GOSPEL AND SOCIALISM— 


or decentralisation is asserting itself, and relieving 
the State of many of its petty functions. There 
are two poles of government—the State and local 
bodies. On popular representative councils is 
being devolved the care of those interests which 
affect in a vital way the inhabitants of different 
parts ; and these are likely, in course of time, to 
take under their control the gasworks, the liquor 
traffic, the purchase of land to sell it in plots to 
small holders, and such measures as are essential 
to public health and recreation, and the improve- 
ment and embellishment of towns and villages. 

In this way the social question is evolving 
towards solution, but the process does not stop 
here. The means of production are still further 
becoming more and more socialised. Industrial 
operations are less and less carried on by indi- 
viduals, and organised more and more by syndi- 
cates and joint-stock concerns, which collect the 
producers into large masses, and unite their efforts 
to a common end—the profit of the shareholders. 
Never can we go back again to the handloom, to 
cottage industries, or to the stage-coach ; we must 
go forward in obedience to the mighty law of 
social evolution. And what if the next advance 
shall be from private and competitive firms to 


- 
4 os ee ee 


JME LIST RIBOTION OF WEALTH. 257 


some larger firm of collective and national distri- 
bution? The more production is organised on a 
large scale, the easier it will be to take it over, 
and conduct it in the common interest for the 
common good. Let us recognise the law of evolu- 
tion ; let us vindicate the organic character of all 
true progress, and believe that God is bearing us 
on to a more real equality, and a more generous 
brotherhood. The Golden Age, which poets have 
sung and martyrs died for, is not behind, but 
before. It is the fulfilment of the apocalyptic 
vision: “The kingdoms of this world are become 


the kingdom of our Lord, and of His Christ.” 


R 


X, 
THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


EXPERIENCE of life teaches every man that un- 
alloyed happiness cannot be found in this world. 
Joy and sorrow, good and evil, are woven inex- 
tricably into the fortunes of mankind. Things in 
this world are neither very good nor very bad, and 
according to the proportion in which any one has 
met with good or with evil will his view of life and 
the world be determined. In general, objects have 
a light and a dark side, and the highest wisdom 
tells us that we should avoid the habit of viewing 
things from one side alone, and learn to look on 
both sides so as to gain. a balanced view of things. 
But all men are not constituted in such a way as 
to look at both sides of a subject, and judge 
accordingly. By original temperament, or the 
force of circumstances, they are disposed to observe 
the chequered scenery of life from different and 


strongly contrasted points of view. One man, 


i i i 


es es. ee 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 259 


endowed with a bright, easy-going habit of mind, 
perceives only the side of life that basks in sun- 
shine, and everything is rose-coloured to his eye; 
we call him an Optimist, in modern phrase. He 
claps you on the back, and with a ring of laughter 
in his voice tells you that this is the best of all 
worlds. He has never got beyond the playfulness 
of childhood, its bright-eyed beauty, its sunny 
head, and joyous life. Optimism is a bright, but 
shallow, thoughtless, and, in the full-crown man, 
frivolous view of things. It takes no account of 
the tragedy of life, and of all the mental contra- 
dictions and moral anomalies which appeal to our 
profoundest faculties for some solution. It can 
never be the philosophy of any one who seeks to 
understand the world in which he lives. The man 
of different temperament is apt, again, to dwell on 
the shady side of things, and see them all black. 
He who stays on the shady side is a Pessimist. 
To his thinking this is the worst of all worlds, 
and as for man’s life it is not worth living. He 
sees the depths of dark mystery in which this 
world rolls through space; he looks at life, and 
finds it like the sphinx amid its dreary sands on 
the edge of the desert, hewn into a riddle, a 
bewildering puzzle, a mocking fate. The decep- 


260 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


tions of this Vanity Fair called Life no longer 
hold him; never has there been anything like ful- 
ness of earthly or human joy; there was a tinge 
of bitterness in the first and sweetest taste of the 
world’s. cup, while old experience finds only 
bitterness — “ vanity and vexation of spirit ;” 
nothing but the barrenness of chance and change 
is the end of all our paths. Darkness girdles the 
restlessness of man’s little life, and strain his eyes 
as he may to pierce the darkness, it seems to be 
allin vain. This view of life has taken hold of 
many minds in our day, and by them it has been 
erected into something like the position of a 
philosophy, and invested with something like the 
authority of a religion. In an age that assails the 
supernatural or spiritual order, there will always 
be a large class of minds to whom pessimism will 
approve itself as a truer feeling and philosophy 
than the enthusiasm of humanity. In the wake of 
materialistic and agnostic theories, what can we 
expect to hear but the wail of men as of children 
crying in the night? And the question is sure to 
follow, “‘ Why has man been thus made in vain?” 
In many respects that question is the problem of 
all the ages; it presses upon him, as his thought 
deepens, and presses till it paralyses his best 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 261 


energies. ‘There are two paths along which human 
progress has been and will be accomplished. 
Culture, education, knowledge—but with or with- 
out God. If with God, that path will be the path 
of the just, shining more and more unto the perfect 
day; but if without God, that path will lead 
downwards to the deep, where no light falls and 
no deliverance comes. “Not unpunished,” says 
Luthardt, “‘does man eat of the fruit of the tree 

of knowledge, unless that divine grace is at hand | 
which heals not only the wounds and sorrows of 
life, but also the tortures of knowledge. Culture 
and knowledge without God are the Prometheus 
of Grecian fable.” We must, however, grant 
absolute freedom of thought to examine the world, 
and the problem which it undoubtedly offers to 
the human intellect for explanation ; and whenever 
such a concession has been made, enough will arise 
to demonstrate the legitimacy of the pessimistic 
position. The facts of the world and the experi- 
ences of human hearts start problems that have 
strained the finest intellects since the birth of 
thought. A strain of pessimism runs through all 
literature—runs through all lives that have been 
deeply exercised by thought or by suffering. 
Whatever else there may be in life, there is in it 


262 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


a strange capacity of suffering, and it is a capacity 
which increaseth with the advance of culture and 
refinement. “He that increaseth knowledge 
increaseth sorrow,” is the utterance of one of those 
highly strung natures that, amid disappointment 
and failure, paint their knowledge of life in sombre 
hues. This pessimist view finds expression not 
only in the sadness of Hcclesiastes, but in the 
overwhelming sorrow of the Book of Job. When 


the patriarch, standing on the rock of righteousness, _ 


from which his three supercilious friends try to 
oust him,—and God seems to join them in the 
fierce hurricane of anguish He pours upon him,— 
when Job lifts his cry to heaven, bewails the day 
of his birth, and passionately yearns for death, it 
is hardly possible to conceive the tragedy of life 
in a situation more bewildering and terrible. The 
vein of pessimism runs deeply through the Greek 
drama and Roman literature in the days of the 


Empire. Even old Homer, the bright-hearted, 


may be heard sighing that “there is nothing 
whatever more wretched than man;” the same 
wail disturbs the light-hearted Odes of Horace ; and 
when we come to the time of Seneca, we find him 
saying that “ death is the last invention of nature.” 


Modern poetry breathes a tone of sadness, almost 


| nae en eae ae ee 


THE GOSPEL AND. PESSIMISM, 263 


of despair, in such voices as those of Heine, Byron, 
and Shelley. The prevailing tone of Wordsworth 
and Browning is of a kind that is joyous and 
hopeful; but Tennyson is the truer poet, in that 
he sees with such terrible vividness the dark side 
of the heart and life and time, and yet strives to 
flash upon it all some higher meaning, some more 
splendid light. No poet has felt the riddle of this 
painful world so keenly as he, nor is it surprising 
if tones of despondency do escape at times from 
his lips; he could have been a pessimist but for 
his Christian faith and love. Some of our most 
imaginative men of genius have been deeply | 
pessimistic in their look at the anxieties of our 
time. Carlyle had none of the optimism which 
blinks at moral calamity, which evades all distinct 
sight of it, and persuades itself with too much 
ease that it is not evil but good. He was always 
trying to teach us the opposite—to give us, what we 
know was so largely due to temperament, a bitter 
and distempered view of life. The prevalence of 
melancholy, especially among the well-to-do and 
cultivated classes, must be noted as a characteristic 
of our age. The tendency of half the literature of 
the day is to enfeeble, and even to paralyse, men 
by fixing their thoughts upon themselves — by 


264 LE GOSPLT AND FLSSIMISM: 


fostering the growth of self- dissection, and a 
dejected and microscopic exaggeration of miseries. 
When the emphasis is placed on these things, one 
has begun to be a pessimist; he lays himself open 
to be haunted by the incessant whisperings of a 
voice which asks,— 


“Were it not better not to be, 
Than live so full of misery ?” 


This mood of prevailing melancholy has led in 
our time to a pessimistic theory of life. It would 
be difficult to deny that such a theory has an 
immense amount to support it in the facts of the 
world and of life. The legitimacy of its position 
can be found in the darkness, acknowledged by all, 
which surrounds the problem of evil. Who has 
ever been able to give a reasoned and satisfactory 
account of all the moral confusions, agonies, and 
terrors that have afflicted the best specimens of our 
race? For pessimism, as a philosophy, formulates 
the old-world enigma that goodness and happiness 
are not correlated in human lives. If good, and 
not evil, be supreme, why should the good suffer, 
and the evil flourish like a green bay tree? We 
have a moral ideal in our nature, and yet the 
world in which we are placed seems to be far from 
what this ideal demands. Physical nature is full 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 265 


of forces blind and deaf, that cut across the field of 
human will, emotion, and purpose—reckless of the 
havoc they make and the hopes they disappoint. 
How shall we reconcile the standard of the moral 
ideal, that forms the apex and crown of our nature, 
with such a world of pitiless fact? From the 
religious standpoint, the problem of evil is equally 
difficult, or more so. For since religion postulates 
a God in heaven, why did He not make a better 
world than this one, which so groans and travails 
together in pain? And if He did not create evil, 
why did He permit it? Since He predetermined 
the development of this world, He might have 
prevented all its pain. How can a Being of perfect 
goodness and all this moral evil be reconciled? In 
the face of such contradictions as arise from any 
point of view we like to take, it is felt that the 
difficulty of solution must be great. From the 
time of Job down to the time of Leibnitz, attempts 
have been made to give a rational harmony of life 
and the world. Leibnitz undertakes in his 
Theodicy, to prove that this is the best world 
possible. Optimism, as a philanthropic creed, 
receives at his hand the most perfect vindication 
that can be given. He argues that God in His 
wisdom has chosen the most perfect world,—that 


266 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


wisdom obeying moral rather than physical re- 
quirements,—and the world is one in which the 
greater perfection and happiness of the whole shall 
be realised. Good and evil are the mixed colours 
of brightness and shadow needed to form a true 
picture—the chords and discords which go to make 
the full symphony of life. That jubilant idea of 
life and the world became the prevalent tone of 
mind in the eighteenth century, and found a 
worthy expression in the closing lines of Pope’s 
Essay on Man, — 
“All nature is but art unknown to thee ; 

All chance, discretion which thou canst not see ; 

All discord, harmony not understood ; - 

All partial evil, universal good ; 

And spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, 

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.” 

But when this scheme of things was subjected to 
deeper inquiry by such keen critics of speculative 
method as Hume and Kant, its insufficiency was 
discovered. Much of the argument for it appeared 
to be reasoning in a circle. It seemed to minimise 
or disregard moral evil, for how could that be 
called sin, or reprobated as bad, which was a means 
to higher good? Kant rejected alike the absolute 
dogmas of optimism and pessimism in his estimate 
of their sufficiency to explain the mysteries of evil 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 267 


and suffering, though he adopted the common 
optimism of the age; and what the Kritik of this 
thinker demolished, his Metaphysik tried to build 
up again by the aid of the categorical imperative 
as the highest law of life. 

The mantle of Kant has been rent in twain by 
Hegel and Schopenhauer—Hegel taking hold of 
optimism, and Schopenhauer of pessimism. While 
Hegel conceded very much to the darker view, he 
contrived by some ingenious reasonings about 
separations and reconciliations, to reach the brighter 
view of the world and life. ‘That the history of 
the world is this process, and the actual becoming 
of the spirit, amid the changing drama of its 
several histories —this is the true theodicy, the 
justification of God in history. The mind can 
only reconcile itself to the history of the world, 
and to actuality, by recognismg that what has 
happened and is happening every day, not only 
does not happen without God, but is essentially 
the work of God itself.” 

This view of the world as a process of evolution 
towards some rational and worthy end, holds a 
place of importance in modern thought; it is one 
which accords with Comte’s social ideal and 
Darwin’s doctrine of evolution. 


268 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


On the other hand, Schopenhauer, starting 
likewise from Kant’s criticism, and seeking to 
correct it by its own light, shows all existence to 
be a burden, evil and remediless, and in working 
out his system has done it with such originality 
and ingenuity, that he is regarded as the founder 
of modern pessimism. He was born at Dantzic in 
1788. Both his parents were remarkable persons, 
His father, a rich merchant, was a man of some 
culture, but with a restless temperament and 
choleric disposition. His mother was a fair little 
woman, vivacious, clear - headed, and of refined 
tastes. He was wont to say that children inherit 
moral character from their father and intellectual 
qualities from their mother, and so we understand 
that he was naturally passionate and irritable in 
temper, but endowed with strong powers of mind. 
His education tended to strengthen his peculiar- 
ities ; he travelled in France and England, mixing 
freely in the best intellectual society, and 
acquainting himself with the world rather than 
with books. This trained him in the school of 
realities, and gave him a certain advantage in the 
development of his thought, which led some one to 
remark that his philosophy is not like any other, 
because it is one which has seen the world. All 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 269 


the opinions that a clear and self-reliant thinker 
could invent were early formed. At eighteen he 
was convinced of the misery of men ; at twenty- 
one, of their depravity ; and at twenty-five, of his 
vast mental superiority to the most of men. The 
relation between him and his mother was peculiar 
and painful. His melancholy disturbed, while 
his dogmatism puzzled her. He does not show to 
advantage during his sojourn under her roof at 
Weimar, in wrangling with her as to which of 
their works will fare hardest with posterity. His 
principal work, The World of Will and Repre- 
sentation, was published when he was twenty- 
eight, and though it was not widely received at 
first, or studied as it now is in Germany and 
England, yet it gave him rank among the leading 
thinkers of his age. It is not our purpose to give 
an account of his philosophy, or examine its merits 
and defects, at any length; we shall do enough 
if we show its bearings in a few sentences. 
According to him, will is the only real existence, 
the underlying unity of the world: it is an 
immanent, not a transient, force. Its first form in 
the world of appearance—the “ objectivation of 
will,” he calls it—is knowledge, perception, or 
consciousness. This bold generalisation is the 


270 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


chief cornerstone of his system, and marks it off 
as distinctly original. While most philosophers 
start from the intellect or the emotions, he starts 
from the will as the primal force in nature, con- 
scious and powerful in man, less so in the lower 
animals, fainter still in the vegetable kingdom, but 
not absent even from inorganic matter, as in the 
phenomena of attraction and electricity. The 
world as will precedes the world as idea. Next, 
the affirmation of will is existence, or the will to 
live; and the will to live, or instinct of self-pre- 
servation, evolves intelligence as its servant, to 
show what objects it blindly strives after, and how 
they may be reached. The will is, in its very 
nature, desire, or need of something, and striving 
to get it; and striving involves pain. Since will, 
desire, striving, pain, remain positive and persistent 
elements of our nature, no satisfaction is enduring ; 
they create a perpetual striving and insatiable 
thirst. Therefore, the negation of the will to live 
is the only possible happiness. This is the meta- 
physical basis of Schopenhauer’s view of things ; 
it is the religion of Buddhism, with its aspiration 
after Nirvana; it is the mystic ideal of Moslem 
and Christian, which, seeing no end to the evils of 
existence, desires the annihilation of all individual 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 271 


wills, and hopes thus to terminate the passionate 
and bitter strife. 

Schopenhauer’s pessimistic reading of life rests 
not only on abstract and speculative reasoning, but 
also on the concrete and empirical fact that this 
world is full of misery. The misery of life 
increases in the direct ratio of intelligence, and 
this appears at a minimum in the lower animals, 
but at its maximum in man. In him the same 
ratio holds, sensibility to pain increasing with the 
increase of culture and education. If life is not 
positive pain, it becomes ennui; according to 
Schopenhauer, these two states are ultimate 
elements of life. “As want is the constant 
scourge of the people, so is ennui that of the 
fashionable world.” He concludes that the exist- 
ence of the world is sin, its essence misery, each 
individual a partaker in the transgression, and 
therefore in the misery; and that the only remedy 
for all this wrong is for the chief perpetrator to 
deny what is affirmed, and cease to perpetuate the 
folly of the will to live. He denounced this as a 
crime in his chief work, but later in life he treated 
it as a matter for pity rather than for blame, and 
described man as something that ought not to be, 
as a solecism, a blunder, and a fool. “For,” to 


272 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


RR aE 


use his own words, “this is, as a rule, the course 
of a man’s life, that, befooled by hope, he dances 
into the arms of death.” 

Schopenhauer’s scheme of the world has been 
still further developed and corrected by his pupil, 
Hartmann, in his Philosophy of the Unconscious. 
Leopardi, a poet and philosopher born in the same 
year as Schopenhauer, has sung the miseries of 
existence in tones of pathetic despair. Innately 
morbid, poor, and seldom free from pain, without 
a creed besides, he was cut out to be a pessimist, 
and the following lines utter his sense of the mis- 
fortune and misery of life,— 

“© weary heart, for ever shalt thou rest 
Henceforth. Perished is the great delusion 
That I thought would ne’er have left me—perished! 
Nought now is left of all these dear deceits ; 
Desire is dead, and not a hope remains. 
Rest then for ever. Thou hast throbbed enough ; 
Nothing here is worth such palpitations. 
Our life is valueless, for it consists 
Of nought but ennui, bitterness, and pain. 
The world of clay deserveth not a sigh. 


Now calm thyself; conceive thy last despair, 
And wait for death, the only gift of Fate.” 


It is strange that a creed like pessimism should 
have taken hold of a people so sturdy in knowledge 


and action as the German nation. We cannot 
think it strange that three hundred millions of 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 275 
2 EE 22 BS eee Rie aie aia a a et 


Asiatics should have drunk for ages opium-draughts 
of such fatal doctrines, though that too is extra- 
ordinary enough; but, “that a nation,” as M. 
Caro says, “formed of such robust and vivacious 
elements, should have given a triumphant welcome 
to those theories of despair taught by Schopen- 
hauer—all this seems at first inexplicable.” Still 
more remarkable fact: it appears that the creed of 
the melancholy philosopher has begun’ to commend 
itself to some in our country who have no religion 
of their own, having lost faith in Christianity, yet 
are tired of scepticism. It is a habit with us to 
adopt the worn-out fashions of German speculation, 
and now that Hegelianism has had its day there, 
and the sombre creed of Schopenhauer comes into 
favour, we may hear less of Hegel in our seats of 
learning for some time to come, and more of 
Schopenhauer and his views. Doubtless, a future 
generation will consign his scheme of things to the 
lumber-room, for it seems to be the fate of all 
metaphysical systems to be unverifiable, and go 
far unprofitable, though, like other fashions, they 
are a necessity of the times when they are in 
vogue. 

The German pessimist did not, it seems, find 


life so utterly miserable as he described it, By 
S 


274 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


reducing and simplifying his wants, he obtained 
freedom from anxiety, and found existence 
tolerable, and experienced some degree of pleasure 
in disinterested study of the world’s sorrows. 
They are treated in his writings with a pictur- 
esque eloquence which Hegel could not command 
in preaching his optimistic gospel of life, and 
with a sombre, cynical humour that hid gleams 
of satisfaction somewhere; the artistic beauty of 
his tirades is an assurance to us that they were 
not painful to write, that he did not too strenu- 
ously “affirm” the will which made him a 
pessimist. | 

Whatever may be said about the woes of 
existence, human nature is fortunately so con- 
stituted as to take an optimistic conception of the 
world. The poet gives it voice in the words that — 
“hope springs eternal in the human breast.” 
Children are full of an innocent gladness, and 
young men are ardent and full of enthusiasm. 
While the young are in the world, they fill it with 
sunshine. As a rule, old people are usually 
regarded as pessimists, who praise the former days, 
and say that the world goes from bad to worse ; 
but who has not known old people who have grown 
cheerfuller and lighter-hearted as they have grown 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 275 
aa Oe eas 


older? The majority of men are biassed to think 
well of life, and not ill of it. All the joyousness 
of youth and all the energy of men are quietly 
ignored by those who would impose upon us a 
pessimistic view of life. And the world we live in 
opens to us all a thousand springs of pleasure and 
delight. Schopenhauer found peculiar delight in 
contemplating the beauty of nature and works of 
art, so that the world did not offer to him the 
deadly emptiness of a fool’s paradise. If he had 
been less misanthropic and morbid, and more 
thankful, devout, and open to the sweet influences 
that temper the harshness of life, he might have 
followed another method, and written a Theodicy 
more profound and harmonising than Leibnitz 
attempted. There is a shallow, easy - going op- 
timism, of course, which thinks only of the 
pleasures and not of the pains of life. The true 
reason why optimism is in the poor repute so often 
attached to it is its levity, its superficiality, its 
readiness to suppose that to be the best part of 
work or kind of happiness which is not the best. 
For instance, when it prefers good results which 
can be measured and numbered, which make a 
show, to the implanting of a new principle ; when 
it prefers the test of statistical success to the 


276 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


higher test of moral awakenment and beneficent 
activity. Pessimists are more quick in exposing 
such optimistic superficialities than in making out 
their case of things as tending from bad to worse. 
In addition to what has been said about the 
tendency of human nature to look at the bright 
side of life, it is the witness of sober and thought- 
ful experience, that the sum of happiness does, in 
general, exceed the sum of misery. It is a truth 
which every chastened will is ready to acknow- 
ledge, that he who has had less in life than he 
desired, has yet had more than he deserved. The 
question is a moot one, whether pleasure pre- 
dominates over pain, happiness over misery; we 
know that men of despondent view reply in the 
negative, but we know also that the greatest 
number of men will give their votes for the bright 
and hopeful scheme of things. 

Pessimism ought to be treated as a morbid, dis- 
proportionate, and hurtful estimate of the ills of 
life. There is a want of sanity in multiplying and 
magnifying the evils of the world; there is some- 
thing morbid and unmanly in exaggerating the 
woes of existence. Schopenhauer made the most 
of them, with the result that this habit unmanned 
him; he had none of the courage which laughs at 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. a if 


destiny and makes man so largely the master of 
circumstances ; he had none of the fortitude which 
is the best safeguard in a world that decidedly 
admits of improvement. Such a gloomy estimate 
of life envelops it in darkness, smites all its powers 
with impotence and self-décay. When Schopen- 
hauer teaches that consciousness—which puts man 
at the head of nature—is the mistake and malady 
of nature, we may pronounce the dream of pessim- 
ism to be a paralysing and mischievous nightmare. 
The world we live in is the only world we know, 
and it ill becomes us to paint it in such dark 
colours; it is full of marvellous arrangements for 
securing our happiness, and it invites us to diligent 
co-operation in securing the same end. Instead of 
abusing it, we should rather hold that the soul of 
the world is just ; let us thank God it is no worse 
than it is, and whatever ills it has for us, let us 
meet them with calm, brave hearts. 

The problem of evil and suffering is a great deep, 
deeper than thought can go, and without a God, 
without any belief in an eternal development of the 
personal life, the problem is utterly inexplicable. 
Apart from supernatural religion, there are no 
resources of vitality, no springs of energy to relieve 
the sadness or help us in the strife; apart from the 


278 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


gospel of Jesus Christ, the most ennobling and 
exhilarating motives of life dwindle to poor and 
wasted shreds, insufficient to support men in pro- 
longed suffering, or through the prospect of dreary 
and monotonous care. The evils of life are not 
ignored in Scripture or in the Christian gospel. 
Schopenhauer regards the story of the fall of man 
in Genesis as the one deep spiritual truth of the 
Old Testament, and recognises the fundamental 
view of the world which he presents as being taught 
by Christianity ; yet he did not look so deeply into 
the dark awfulness of the problem as Jesus Christ 
has done. It does not appear that the idea of sin, 
with its concomitant emotions, has properly any 
place in his system ; its existence is held to be the 
repining of will over the discovery of its self-decep- 
tion —an expression of the baffled will for a har- 
monious universe which does not exist. Life is 
not viewed as a good gift from above, which we 
may abuse; but as a debt, contracted by ourselves 
at birth, and which we vainly try to discharge. 
The idea of sin, whether in its reality of guilt or 
pollution or power, does not particularly trouble 
the pessimist; he is not haunted by the pangs of 
selfishness and degradation and shame, but by the 
torments of defeat, disappointment, and despair. 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 279 


Christ does not blink the fact of sin, but arouses 
the sense of it. He paints the vision of pessimism 
in still darker hues than any colourist of that 
gloomy school has ventured to use. And yet what 

teacher ever set forth the intrinsic worth of human — 
life as Jesus Christ sets it forth? The value which 
he puts on every man, however evil and lost, is a 
value simply immeasurable. ‘ What is a man 
profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his 
own soul?” Take the most pessimistic view of 
man which imaginative insight affords, and add to 
it the too much overlooked features of guilt and 
defilement and degradation, yet Christ sees in him 
boundless possibilities of good, and with His gospel 
of redemption casts around him the bow of infinite 
hope. The sure remedy for life’s sorest ills is the 
message of “God in Christ reconciling the world 
unto Himself—God commending His love towards 
us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died 
for us.” The life of the Son of God, the love of 
His atonement, and the power of His resurrection, 
are the primary rays of the one light which lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world. In that 
Light pessimism betakes itself to the moles and 
bats; in that Light the once captive soul can say, 
“He brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of 


280 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and 
established my goings. And He hath put a new 
song in my mouth, even praise unto our God.” 
The gift of Christ’s gospel is a gift of life—of 
“more life and fuller,” and it is one of the most 
distinctive, one of the most impressive, one of the 
most inspiring and animating elements of the 
Christian evangel. Men miss a great part if they 
do not believe in Christ, receive this gift of life, 
and consciously possess it. Christ came to make 
the life of the Eternal ours, and lack of this gift, 
in the fulness of its glory, explains the absence of 
buoyancy, courage, and animation, not only in the 
experience of pessimists who do not know Christ, 
but in the life of many Christian people who 
profess to know Him. The gospel of Christ, as 
new life to dead humanity, is the gift of a spirit of 
power, love, and sound mind; it directly increases 
the spring and elation of the heart; it gives a joy- 
ousness which is not the joyousness of mere light 
hearts, but is the joyousness of creative power—a 
power which transmutes sorrow into the means of 
blessing, which uplifts amid the stress and strain 
of adversity, which gives strength to bear the 
burdens of life, and which increases with the 
victory by which it overcomes the world. The 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 281 


spirit of the race ought to rise, and not to fall, as 
the centuries go on; and all the voices of science, 
art, and improvement on every side say Amen. 
But “the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus” 
is, above all else, the inspiring and elevating power. 
With our knowledge of law, we feel as if we could 
shortly store up light and heat against the cool- 
ing of the sun; but pessimism points to no such 
surplusage of power, when it wraps the pall of 
gloom around us, and would fain shut the Sun of 
Righteousness out of the heavens. The growth 
of scepticism in general, and of pessimism in par- 
ticular, can only tend more effectually to throw a 
damper on the human spirit, to quench for a time 
its vividness and overshadow its joy. It may 
utter a mood of weariness which runs like a wail 
through our modern consciousness, and thus spend 
itself; but a creed so devoid of buoyant and cheer- 
ful outlook has no power to save. It is a temporary 
phase of error, and cannot stay with us, and need 
not, because the fountain of life and hope in a risen 
Christ is on high, inexhaustible, and ready to be 
poured out on us in answer to every revived sense 
of need. As mind and heart, love and self-sacrifice, 
infinite purpose and divine humility, are known to 
brood over us, the more will the spring of joyous- 


282 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


ness mount up to it, and the greater will be the 
elasticity of our mental and moral forces to be the 
evidence of a perennial spring on high from which 
they are derived. 

Pessimism errs in teaching that life’s sorrows are 
an unmitigated curse, and in perpetually whining 
over them. We should not conclude hastily that 
the best world must be without evil. A world 
that answered to pleasant optimistic dreams might 
have been anything but favourable to the highest 
moral devolopments. Wordsworth thinks that 
such a world could not secure even happiness. 

“Tf life were slumber on a bed of down, 
Toil unimposed, vicissitude unknown, 
Sad were our lot.” 

The highest good comes out of evil. In the 
Christian doctrine of the sanctifying effect of afflic- 
tion, we find one of the deepest and most consolatory 
truths of life. There is a permanent element of 
sadness in life, and its inevitableness is often truly 
pathetic. It is easy to look at the dark side of 
things, and grow sad; for life abounds in strange 
sad mysteries, often close at our side. It is easy 
to assume the pessimistic attitude ; but a wise and — 
brave mind will rather seek to know if there is not 
a soul of good in things evil, and learn that purity 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 283 


is more to be desired than happiness, and moral 
riches better than good fortune. The noblest 
spirits see no attraction in ease and pleasure; but, 
dashing these aside, welcome toil and struggle and 
adversity, as far more to them than the charms of 
happiness which spring from the luxurious environ- 
ments of life. We are put to school here, and often 
to rough tasks, but the best lessons are thus learned. 
Let us be anxious, most of all, to discover the 
“moral uses of dark things,” and to see that a 
sovereign will, loving and righteous, works, though 
often darkly, for our highest good. 

The best cure for pessimism is work—work of 
hand or heart. Pessimism does not exist among 
the hardy sons of toil, but rather among those who 
toil not, neither do they spin. There are prosper- 
ous, comfortably situated people who die ofa disease 
which nerve-doctors know as the tedium vite, but 
which may be as well described as the absence of 
content in living. It is not the noble discontent of 
souls ever striving to realise some moral ideal, but 
the sadness bred of a deficient interest in the con- 
cerns of life. It arises from a too great easiness in 
the comforts of life, and want of something to do. 
Instead of desiring for an impossible fulfilment of 
wishes, it would be wise to thrust aside a life too 


284 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


full of materials for refined pleasure, and undertake 
some kind of work. A dose of-Thomas 4 Kempis 
every morning, and two hours a day in the slums, 
would cure the most inveterate pessimist in a 
month. It is untrue to say that all effort is pain, 
and will to live suffering, for worthy effort consti- 
tutes one of the purest and simplest pleasures. 
Work of any sort measures the true worth of being, 
and the more of it we do the richer is the satisfac- 
tion which it will afford. 

To seek others’ good is above all one of the best 
means of lighting dark days and realising one’s 
own happiness. Keble says, ‘‘When you find 
yourselves overpowered as it were by melancholy, 
the best way is to go out and do something kind to 
somebody.” That counsel is wholly good. Sym- 
pathy with others’ woes will take the mind off our 
own, and tend to contribute a distinct element of 
pleasure in the gratification of tender emotion. 
The power of sympathy which Christ gives is a 
great source of imaginative life, and a great help 
to the insight which elevates anguish into tragedy 
and suffering into sacrifice; while it furnishes an 
anodyne for others’ woes, and comes back to us in 
rich returns of benediction. 

It is true that the shadow of the Fall rests on 


THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 285 


our highest and best work, and amid disparagement 
of our holiest efforts, and the pain of actual defeat 
and failure, we are forced to ask, ‘“‘ What profit 
hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under 
the sun?” Karth’s best sons have found their 
bravest endeavours to be fruitless toil; the king- 
liest among them have had to wear the crown of 
thorns. Many a man works for God and man with 
heart and soul for years, and sees no fruit of his 
labour. Our highest exertions prove our most 
palpable failures. All earnest men think they die 
in failure; their highest purposes remain unful- 
filled. Life would be an unaccountable enigma if 
it had not the promise of another life, and there is 
a heaven for those who have failed on earth. 
Every true life shall have its consummation as well 
as its recompense.  Life’s discipline here is a 
development of our powers for heavenly service, 
and nobler ministries in higher worlds will yield 
rewards before whose “exceeding and _ eternal 
weight of glory” all the dreary toils of earth will 
for ever be forgotten. 

The pessimist’s view of the world may be so far 
true that it is not a complete and perfect theatre 
of life. It was not so in early geological ages. 
Non-completion of the Creator’s work can be seen 


286 THE GOSPEL AND PESSIMISM. 


at every stage, and can be seen still. Does not an 
apostle say, with deep insight, that the world groans 
and travails in pain? And this pain and suffering 
are the conditions through which life is striving to 
work itself clear. The Creator is not so much 
rectifying a world that was originally made perfect, 
and has since gone out of gear, but He is gradually 
creating a better world than has yet been seen. 
Under the first view, the existence of evil would 
seem to deny omnipotence, goodness, and love in 
the Author of all things; but if we once grasp the 
idea that the world is not made, but that the 
Creator is making it through us, making us dis- 
satisfied with the world around us that we may 
co-operate with Him to the making of a better 
world, most of the difficulties of pessimism vanish. 
Daylight flashes through them, and the shadows 
flee away. 


XI. 
THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


THERE is a mysterious power in the world which 
has never ceased to captivate the human spirit, 
which appeals to what is highest and noblest in us, 
or yet again to what is lowest and worst. The 
world is full of things which charm the eye and 
ear, which attract the mind, and which excite 
the soul with emotions of wonder, delight, and 
rapture. The world teems with objects of beauty, 
and these objects are endlessly varied in form and 
light and colour, in feature and expression, in 
tone and ordered sound, in word and suggestion. 
And to man has been given the mysterious faculty 
of recognising, appreciating, and reproducing all 
this opulence of the beautiful in nature and life. 
The sense of beauty is at once the most mysterious 
and the most fascinating endowment of our nature, 
and it yields to us some of the most exquisite 
elements of brightness and joy. Whence comes 


288 LTHE GOSPEL AND ART. 


this strange faculty of perception, this instinct for 
the beautiful in creation, this power of producing 
it in every conceivable form of sculpture, architec- 
ture, painting, music, and poetry? Account for 
it as we may, there can be no doubt that it is the 
crown and glory of gifts which sets man at the 
head of all that lives, and affords him treasures of 
boundless delight. 

It is not therefore to be wondered at if a sense 
so full of subtle and varied charm should pre- 
occupy the mind to the exclusion of all other 
Interests, and if devotion to it should almost 
become a religion. It is not surprising that the 
gospel of art seems, among many of its students, 
to have taken the place that can be held alone by 
the gospel of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It 
is not surprising that in this new worship and 
enthusiasm of the time, ‘‘ the wondrous shadows of 
God’s glory should take the place of God Himself 
in His holiness, His righteousness, His moral law.” 
Woe be unto us, however, if we yield to this 
temptation, or imagine that any gospel of beauty 
and art can be a substitute for the gospel of an incar- 
nate and atoning Saviour. For history tells us that — 
such undue exaltation of art brings its own punish- 
ment in the degeneracy both of art and character. 


THE COSPEL AND ART: 289 


In trying, then, to ascertain the relation of 
Christianity to art, it is necessary to form some 
adequate idea of the nature and function of art, 
and find out what religion has to do with it, or 
what it has to do with religion. Does the teaching 
of Christ evoke or enlist this interest, as it does so 
many more, of human life? How far does the 
gospel encourage the cultivation of art, and how 
far does art contribute to the service of the gospel ? 
Since art cannot be ignored in the progress of 
humanity, we may be sure that Christianity has 
something to do with it, something to vitalise, 
purify, and exalt it. The power of religion is 
fitted to aid the highest conception of the dignity 
of art, and of the moral responsibility of the 
artist. 

Proceeding to examine the sphere and service of 
art, we confine what shall be said to the fine arts, 
as distinguished from those that are merely useful, 
from the various manufactures which minister to 
the necessities and conveniences of human life. 
Art stands related to manufacture in the same way 
as beauty does to utility in nature. Everywhere 
do we sce the useful efflorescing into the beautiful, 
and the sphere of art comprehends all nature and 
life under this aspect of beauty. It seeks to 

T 


290 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


interpret and exhibit natural facts with truth and 
fidelity ; it strives to fix a smile or a look of pathos 
in bronze or on the canvas; it loves to render by 
external form the magic of fugitive and evanescent 
emotions. Leonardo was wont to follow up and 
down the streets of Florence or of Milan unknown 
beautiful faces, learning them by heart, interpreting 
their changes of expression, reading their thoughts 
through the features. He has left a series of such 
portraits in outline, each with a subtle charm—a 
procession of shadows cast by reality, that, entering 
the camera of the artist’s brain, gained some new 
and spiritual quality. The artist seeks to catch 
and body forth, in sensible form, that fine essence 
which gleams upon us from the stars, and glows in 
sunsets, which blushes in flowers and flashes on 
the sea, which peers forth in visible features and 
invisible character, which streams everywhere in 
colour and form, evermore to fascinate and thrill 
us. Artis the power to express whatever delights 
the eye and ear, and transfer the inmost truth of 
things to poem and picture and music. It should 
pierce directly to the simple and true. The best 
of beauty is subtler than the skill of surfaces and 
outlines, or the surprise of brilliant hues or sym- 
metrical forms. Personal loveliness, inexpressive 


LHE GOUSPEL: AND ART, 291 


of inner meaning, has no attraction for the highest 
art. To draw a fair naked body for the sake of its 
carnal charm is to degrade art, and make it the 
minister of vice. Its true function is the familiar 
expression, through stone, canvas, or sound, of the 
deepest and simplest attributes of nature and life. 
Its highest charm is the universal language which 
it speaks, as in the sculptures of the Greek and 
in the pictures of the Italian schools. In the 
Athenian school of art we have the truth of human 
form as it had never been expressed before or 
since. Greek sculptors made the discovery that 
the body of man is a miracle of beauty, each limb 
a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as the 
sight of stars or flowers. In the Florentine and 
Venetian schools of art, the truth of human expres- 
sion and the effect of ight and colour on all things 
have been set forth with a mastery that can never 
be surpassed. It is a dictum of the highest art 
that natural truth comes first, and beauty after- 
wards. The aim of the artist is not mere esthetic 
taste, but faithful interpretation of nature. True 
art sees, feels, and reproduces nature and character, 
Beauty, pathos, and success all lie in being simply 
natural. 

Art has, however, an element distinctly human, 


292 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


what may be called the ideal, and the ideal is the 
highest truth. Every great work of art is an 
honest effort to give it expression. It does not 
consist in mere literalism—in a slavish imitation, 
but in a free interpretation of natural facts. It is 
impossible to arrange real drapery, as great artists 
arrange it on their canvas. Skill depends on 
intentional or unconscious deviation from literal 
accuracy. Raphael deviated intentionally, for he 
said that he did not paint what is, but that which 
ought to be. This is search after the ideal, a high 
capacity for which comes forth in the production 
of a fine taste and delicate sense of beauty, or in 
the creations of artistic genius; delight in the 
ideal produces a noble discontent with what is 
common, accompanied by a fine relish for whatever 
approximates to itself. In Leonardo's Last Supper 
at Milan, the head of Christ was never finished, 
because the artist could not realise his too lofty 
ideal. A sublime genius is always discontented 
with its own works. And here we find once more 
the image of God in man set forth in lines of 
indubitable parallelism. The idealist or transcen- 
dentalist in art shows affinity with, and, after a 
measure, the potency of the Supreme Artist Him- 
self. The fountain of beauty is in God, and the 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 293 


effort of art is to reach it, and the noble discontent 
it feels is due to a sense of shortcoming. The 
artist, in virtue of the ideal, is, like God, a maker 
ora creator. The poet, the musician, the sculptor, 
the painter, each moulds the proper material at 
his disposal, and lords over it like a God. Why 
have the lower animals no poets or painters or 
architects? Simply because they have not been 
made in the image of God, or endowed with that 
divine faculty of creative sovereignty which, next 
to his religious nature, constitutes man’s pre- 
eminence. 

Art ought, then, to be true to nature and life, 
and it has a higher function than merely to imitate. 
The artist abdicates his office who simply repeats 
for the mass of men what they see for themselves. 
He must bid them see the ideal as he realises it. 
He drops details, the prose of nature, and gives the 
spirit and splendour; he looks beyond features to 
character, and treats the outward man before him 
as an imperfect likeness of the aspiring original 
within ; he strives to make clear to others what 
finer insight has made visible to himself. There 
is an element of ideality and infinity in his works. 
Orpheus, Homer, Titian, Turner, and Handel have 
caught for us the splendour of meaning that plays 


294 THE GOSPEL AND AKT. 


over the world, the rhythmic sounds that hint 
some perfect harmony of the universe. The works 
of art suggest something beyond that which they 
directly present,—something to be looked for, and 
felt after, thoughts which they quicken but do not 
satisfy. Thus— 


“ Art may tell a truth 
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, 
Nor wrong the thought.” 

How closely art is in this way allied to religion, 
and well nigh a part of it, looking away to the 
ideal and infinite, we do not stop to indicate, but 
shall go on to sketch as briefly as possible the 
history of art, and learn therefrom its further 
connection with religion. 

Art may be traced as far back as Egypt and 
Assyria, and must have existed there full of might 
and majesty, as testified by monuments whose 
silent language is still intelligible to us. Moses 
carried this art-power, derived from both these 
countries, into the wilderness, and it was shown 
in the building of the Tabernacle, and many 
kinds of workmanship connected with its services. 


Bezaleel, the chief artificer of the Tabernacle, was 


filled with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in 
understanding, and in knowledge, and in all 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 295 


manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, 
to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass. He 
had a large number of skilled workmen under him, 
and they seem to have been specially expert in the 
art of cutting, polishing, and engraving of gems. 
Tt is evident, then, that art, under the name of 
cunning work, existed among the Hebrews at 
the time of the Exodus, and while conforming in 
several respects to “the manner of Egypt,” it was 
far from being a mere copy or continuation of 
Egyptian art. It was regarded as a gift of divine 
inspiration, and the gift thus conferred on Bezaleel 
must have chosen its own forms of workmanship. 
Of course, the genius of art in its grander, finer 
forms, was not possible to wanderers in the desert. 
They could have no architecture, properly so called, 
and therefore no painting and no sculpture. In 
Solomon’s Temple, however, architectural effects 
were achieved, for it was to be ‘“ exceeding magni- 
fical;” and on the walls of the house there were 
carved figures of cherubim and palm trees and 
open flowers. These figures represent art minis- 
tering at the shrine of religion—forms of natural 
beauty and fruitfulness, conjoined with forms of 
spiritual sublimity in the service of God. 
Architecture is the oldest of the arts, as Egypt 


296 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


and Assyria testify, and from it the rest take their 
commencement. Sculpture follows, and this work 
of investing thought with sensible shape became 
the characteristic fine art of Greece. It is the 
mission of art to impress the thoughts of the mind 
upon stone, and architecture is usually the first 
form in which such an attempt is made; but the 
struggle with matter is not yet brought forth unto 
victory. In sculpture, however, the material is 
more subdued to supersensual power, and made to 
be the vehicle of the spirit. We owe the best 
sculpture ever produced to Greece, and to Phidias, 
its great master. Never was thought so nobly 
impressed upon stone, or the goodliness of the 
human form so perfectly represented, as it was by 
the Athenian school. Those moral and spiritual 
qualities which the Greeks recognised as truly 
human, and therefore divine, were incarnated in 
well-selected types of physical perfection. The 
Greeks thought their gods to be incarnate persons, 
men and women of finer mould, and the artist 
selected corporeal qualities to impersonate the 
special character of each divinity, and strove to 
make it as impressive in his marble as possible. — 
“In a Greek statue there was enough soul to 
characterise the beauty of the body, to render her 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 297 


due meed of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish the 
swiftness of Hermes from the strength of Hercules, 
or to contrast the virginal grace of Artemis with 
the abundance of Aphrodite’s charms.”’ The 
Parthenon, with its gods and heroes, robed in 
raiment that revealed their living form, shows 
sculpture in all the grace, repose, and strength 
that belongs to her domain of placid concrete form. 
There they are, clear as morning, and calm in the 
unconsciousness of beauty, matchless representa- 
tions of ancient art, yet with all the faults due to 
the inefficiency of material which sculpture works 
upon. It cannot give the glow of light and colour 
to its figures, or express some of the most. sig- 
nificant features. But for rounded contour of 
beautiful forms, for tranquillity and self-restraint, 
the Greek school of art remains unsurpassed. 
Coming to the middle ages, we find architecture 
carried to a pitch of grandeur and beauty it had 
never reached, and is not likely to reach again. 
Architecture was pre-eminently a medieval art, and 
sprang out of a genuine religious enthusiasm, in 
which the spirit of worship took into affiance the 
spirit of art. It suited, because it grew out of the 
mysticism of the middle ages, their vague but 


1 Renaissance in Italy ; J. A. Symonds. 


298 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


potent feelings of infinity, their ecstatic contem- 
plations, their yearning towards a deity invisible 
but localised in holy things and places. The 
Gothic style of work, with its lofty shaft and 
springing arch and high-pitched roof, is full of 
mystic faith and aspiration, and seems to say, 
“Look up. Not here.” We speak of the dark 
ages, and they had gross superstitions; but out 
of them came that marvel of devotional literature, 
The Inutation of Christ, and those marvels of 
deep-wrought stone, such as the cathedrals of 
Milan and Rouen, and the abbeys of Tintern and 
Melrose, so full of exquisite harmony of parts, as 
to give rise to the saying that architecture is 
petrified music. The voices of the old builders 
are hushed for ever, but, as Ruskin says in the 
Seven Lamps of Architecture, we have “ those 
fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild 
fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and 
quainter than ever filled the depth of midsummer 
dream ; those vaulted gates, trellised with close 
leaves ; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery 
and starry light; those misty masses of multitud- 
inous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only 
witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the fear 
and faith of nations. .. . They have taken with 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 299 


them to the grave their powers, their honours, 
and their errors, but they have left us their 
adoration.” 

At the close of the middle ages, between the 
thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, another 
great age of art arose in Italy, when architecture 
and sculpture had their renaissance, and painting 
became, what sculpture had been to Greece, the 
distinguishing fine art of the period. At that 
time the entire nation seemed to be endowed with 
an instinct for the beautiful, and a power to 
represent it in every conceivable form; but paint- 
ing reached a point of perfection that placed Italy 
among all the nations of the world unapproachably 
alone. A new cycle of religious ideas and feelings 
had been introduced by Christianity, and to express 
them the genius of art had to devise a more pliant 
and scopeful medium. “ Faith, hope, and charity ; 
humility, endurance, suffering; the resurrection 
and the judgment; the fall and the redemption ; 
heaven and hell; the height and depth of man’s 
mixed nature; the drama of human destiny before 
the throne of God;” for this sphere of thoughts 
the Greek sculptor’s marble and chisel were utterly 
_ inadequate —it demanded some higher artistic 


- power. An art was needed to be at home in the 


300 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


sphere of intense feeling, to haunt Calvary instead 
of Helicon, and Olivet instead of Olympus, and 
to represent such scenes as the Last Judgment. 
Painting, in the hands of such masters as Leo- 
nardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, has furnished 
a more elastic medium of expression for those new 
Christian elements, and in the works of those 
masters has given supreme displays of artistic 
skill that can never cease to be the admiration 
of the world. To painting belongs the power of 
colour and shadow, perspective and grouping, in 
a measure denied to sculpture. The former art 
likewise represents the play of features, indicative 
of varied motives and delicate sentiments, and 
transient emotions that flash out from | inner 
depths of the soul. In the masterpieces of this 
art, all the charming grace of form and witchery — 
of colour have been employed to delineate the lofty 
thoughts, the tender sentiments, the mighty 
terrors, the splendid hopes of the Christian faith. 
When painting had thus fulfilled its high task, 
another art arose to do much that painting could 
not achieve. Music expresses the soul in its” 
manifold feeling and perplexity of movement. It 
possesses a mysterious command over the realm of 
emotions, creating atmospheres of joy and peace 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 301 


which no other art can produce, and restoring 
harmony to the sweet bells of the spirit “ jangled, 
out of tune.” The simple notes of David’s harp 
dispelled the evil spirit in King Saul, and a fine 
melody, disconnected from words, will make the 
listener feel that there are things unutterable ; it 
gives a distinct form to moods of feeling as yet 
undetermined. Music is the language of emotions 
that border on the infinite and eternal, and more 
than any other art expresses the spirit in its 
freedom, and therefore it is the essentially modern 
art. It is an undoubted fact that music, in its 
highest developments, is as peculiarly the art of the 
last three centuries as architecture was the art of 
the middle ages, or as painting was the art of the 
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. It 
is within the last three centuries that the great 
musicians were born, Handel in 1685, Mozart in 
1756, Beethoven in 1772, Mendelssohn in 1808; 
and to these and other composers of the same 
period we are indebted for the most perfect 
creations of music that have been given to the 
world. Since music is so peculiarly a modern 
art, its function may be to effect for the societies 
of to-day, so highly organised and intensely self- 
~ conscious, what sculpture and painting, and poetry, 


302 THE GOSPEL AND ART: 


which has been of all times, effected for the simpler 
communities of the past. It is the least intellectual 
of all the arts, not able to compete with poetry, 
dispensing with words and even thoughts; yet so 
divine a gift as to express emotions of infinite 
joy and sorrow, and carry away the soul from the 
dim and feeble yearnings of time to the vast and 
glorious harmonies of eternity. 

After this survey, it will appear that a historical 
connection has always existed between religion and 
art. In Greek sculpture the two were merged, 
and in Itahan painting Christianity afforded to art 
its noblest subjects, while art did much to humanise 
the mysteries, and set forth the solemnities, of the 
Christian faith. The question still remains, whether 
art and religion are related to one another by an — 
inward necessity. However close may be the tie 
which, as a matter of history, has united them, 
can the connection between them be said to be 
necessary ? Some hold religion to be opposed to 
art, because it refers us to a life beyond the present, 
and disturbs that finished self-contained harmony 
of this world which art has for its sphere and end. 
It is also argued that Christianity aims so much at 
strenethening the moral and spiritual nature of — 
man, that it has no sympathy with attempts to 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 303 
5 eS oe Oe ees 


express its great truths in forms of time and sense. 
A writer on the Renaissance in Italy entertains the 
difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to 
Christianity, when he says, “The spirit of Christi- 
anity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, 
not because such art is immoral, but because it 
cannot free itself from sensuous associations, It 
is always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, 
from which the faith would sever us. It is always 
reminding us of the body which piety bids us 
forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which 
saints and ascetics have mortified. The master- 
pieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, lead 
the soul away from compunction, away from 
penitence, away from worship even, to dwell on the 
delight of youthful faces, blooming colour, oraceful 
movement, delicate emotion. ... Art, by magni- 
fying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline 
maxims: ‘For me to live is Christ, and to die is 
gain ;’ ‘Set your affections on things above, not 
on things on earth ;’ ‘ Your life is hid with Christ 
in God.’” In addition to such a view, it may be 
said that devotion to art in Italy took the place of 
truth, morality, righteousness, Christian life, and 
_ worship of beauty for its own sake brought its own 
_ Nemesis in the degeneracy alike of art and character. 


304 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


Now, such argument has large truth in it, and should 
be kept before us, with its lesson; but it does not 
sustain the inference of an essential antagonism 
between Christianity and fine art. On the other 
hand, it is sufficient to show that a necessary 
connection between them, so often taken for 
eranted, cannot be made out. As to the argument 
thus adduced for the opposition of the gospel to 
esthetic taste, let us observe that it is founded on 
the ascetic or monastic spirit of Christianity, and 
not on the Christianity of Christ. The ascetic 
form of piety, as seen in our Puritan and Covenant- 
ing ancestors, has no sympathy with natural or 
artistic beauty ; but Christ Himself cherished and 
manifested a different spirit, when He consecrated 
natural and human enjoyments at Cana of Galilee, 
when He pointed to the lilies of the field with their — 
glorious beauty, and when He taught by parables, 
those word-pictures by which He embodied truths 
of spiritual significance in forms of the beautiful. — 
The healthiest Christian temper rejoices in the 3 
sight of all visible beauty, fully, heartily, and 
welcomes it as the suggestion of a higher beauty ; 
while the temper of religious severity turns away 
from all earthly loveliness, and mortifies it as the - 
lust of the. eyes. We need not contend that art 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 305 


derives its origin from religion, or that no great art 
can exist without religious impulse. The two 
occupy different spheres, though as a matter of 
history they have always been near neighbours, 
and have often been in mutual alliance. Art has 
found its native home in religion, and it would be 
disastrous to both alike if the bond which unites 
them were to be broken. Art is one of the spiritual 
powers of our nature, and the most delicate of them 
all, approximating to the religious spirit, and apt 
to become a religion when it is idolatrously 
pursued. Nothing, however, in the artistic spirit 
is at all incompatible with the purest spirit of 
devotion ; indeed, it draws us continually towards 
a state of mind akin to the devotional, by requiring 
us to spend our time in absorbed study of the work 
of the Supreme Artist. Art requires religion, and 
religion may be served by art. Religious awe and 
moral nobility are needed to make a genuine artist. 
With Michael Angelo the service of beauty wasa re- 
ligion ; not, indeed, as a substitute for religion, but 
because religion was alike his sublime subject and 
mighty inspiration in the fulfilment of that service. 
How spiritual and creative art is, we see in its 
triumph of mind over matter. It sets the stamp 


of beauty on the sensible. Ancient sculpture re- 
U 


306 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


presents the gods in human forms that charm us 
with their symmetry. It subdues the cold marble 
in a wonderful way to express human thought, but 
the limits of matter still keep it from surmounting | 
the finite and natural. Painting, by the aid of 
light and colour, achieves a still greater degree 
of creative and spiritual mastery. It expresses a 
wider and higher range of mind and heart. Music 
uses a still subtler and more spiritual medium, and 
therefore penetrates more deeply the life of the 
soul. “The high, the truly moral destiny of 
music is to render sensible the harmonious emotions 
and images of a mind stirred by the revelation of 
God and His kingdom, by a poetry of sound as 
deeply felt as it is artistic.” * 

Religion and art have their home in the world 
of the ideal, and both of them strive to keep before 
us a harmony of existence beyond the discords of 
this world. Art is man’s effort to get nearer the 
mind of God in His works—to feel and express 
those ideas of order, balance, and harmony that 
have been wrought into the material universe. 
Religion is man’s effort to get nearer the heart of 
God—to feel and express those same ideas in the 
moral sphere. Beauty is the pursuit of both— 


1 Luthardt’s Moral Truths of Christianity. 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 307 
Sear ee eee we Ee 
beauty being the earthly shadow of holiness, and 


holiness the spiritual form of beauty. They both 
aim at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the 
transfiguration of human elements into something 
nobler, apprehended by the imagination, felt by the 
heart, and cast into shape by the will. All beauty 
has in it a suggestion of the transcendent and in- 
finite ; it is ever pointing away beyond itself, as if 
holding a hint and gleam of eternity in its eye. 
It is the office of all high art, as of true religion, to 
allure us away into the mysterious and infinite. 
All beauty has in it the hint and token of a 
completed ideal ; it is the lustre of perfection—the 
sunshine on a landscape that brightens and spirit- 
ualises it. Whatever strikes us as pre-eminently 
beautiful is deemed by us most nearly to approach 
perfection of its kind. Our intellectual apprehen- 
sion of beauty, whether it be in a poem or painting, 
or in the beauty of human character and action, is 
a perception of ideal completeness realised to a 
greater or less extent. Our admiration and delight 
rise in proportion as anything reaches perfect ex- 
pression ; and yet, however great our admiration 
of, and delight in, anything may be, we can mostly 
conceive of an ideal beauty greater still. The finest 
thing in all the world is when natural and spiritual 


308 THE GOSPELCANDIARTY, 


beauty meet, and meet in high degrees of fulfilment; 
yet that is but the dim hint, and fragmentary 
intimation, of something still more perfect. That 
the eye “is not satisfied with seeing” is the 
language both of religion and art; and both of 
them, although in greatly different measures of 
distinctness, teach us to look for perfection beyond 
the visible. 

Christianity and art ought, then, to be viewed 
as harmonious influences in human life. Each aids. 
the other. Art owes to Christianity the material 
out of which her noblest and sublimest representa- 
tions have been derived. The gospel opened up a 
world of fact and a world of feeling for displays of 
artistic genius never known before. Christ Himself, — 
the desired of all nations, in whom the Deity 
assumed a human form and dwelt among men,— 
Christ on Calvary, showing forth triumphant 
majesty in lowliest meekness and sorrow, — pre- 
sented an order of subjects than which no grander 
could be conceived, and they have been represented 
by Rubens, Raphael, and Rembrandt in pictures of 
unsurpassed loveliness. ‘“ The ancient world knew — 
the divine only as the majesty of power, not as the | 
grace of condescension to the depths of human woe. 
Christianity not only disclosed a new world to art, 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 309 


but bestowed upon her a new soul.” Art has found 
its highest opportunity for interpreting beauty in 
life under the light of the incarnation and the cross 
of Christ, and therefore the gospel claims for Him 
the ministry of art in every shape and sound, in 
every form and colour. As Christianity claims 
the service of art, so art should view it as the 
reonant power. If it is to have a home in the wide 
mansion of religion, it must be as a child of the 
house, and not as wielding or usurping authority. 
The function of Christianity is to purify and elevate 
the mission of art. 

It is a question of some moment to deter- 
mine the aim of art. Is it moral or immoral? 
Is it simply to please? The question of its 
moral or immoral character is very much a specu- 
lative one. Abstractly considered, it cannot be 
said to depend on the morality of the artist; but 
viewed practically, all true art is moral, and 
as one of the natural powers it is to be consecrated 
by the gospel and charged with the spirit of moral 
truth. It is the pure soul that makes the true 
artist ; it is the man of reverent mood and severe 
taste that dignifies the chisel and brush, employ- 
ing them to execute worthy performances. The 
healthiest temper of art is undoubtedly moral, 


310 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


while its function is to minister to the joy and 
happiness of life. When prosecuted in a spirit of 
moral goodness, and contemplating moral goodness 
as its end, we can freely recognise it as one of the 
chief sources of brightness. ‘A thing of beauty 1s 
a joy for ever.” Opposition exists between art 
which takes pleasure in God’s works, and all those 
forms of religious fanaticism which turn away 
from earthly loveliness, and condemn pleasure as 
sinful. But Christianity as well as art bids us 
rejoice in the sight of all visible beauty, fully and 
exquisitely, while it inspires art with a feeling of 
purity, and thus transfigures it. Art is, in its 
masterpieces, always moral, but in no narrow and 
conventional sense. The best art is, like Titian’s 
or Shakespeare’s, true to the great glad instincts of 
our nature, severely faithful to its foibles, never 
morbid or emasculated, many-sided without being 
unbalanced, and forcible without losing the fine 
sense of proportion. Art is capable of ministering 
to selfishness and luxury, and then it becomes that 
corruption of the best which leads to the worst 
consequences. It ceases to be true art when it 1s 
divorced from religion, and when it takes the place 
of God in His holiness and grace, instead of lifting © 
reverent gaze to His throne. When its sole aim 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 311 


is to please, and to excite mere sensuousness, it 
has begun to degenerate, and will hasten the ruin 
of the states it has adorned. In the words of John 
Ruskin: ‘The names of great painters are like 
passing bells: in the name of Velasquez, you hear 
sounded the fall of Spain ; in the name of Titian, 
that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of 
Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. 
And there is profound justice in this; for in pro- 
portion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt 
of its use for purposes vain or vile.” If art would 
fulfil its true mission, and not degrade the nation, 
it must be duly subordinated to religion and 
morality, and not yield to the temptation of seek- 
ing to be their rival and supplanter. It is capable 
of exercising moral and immoral functions, but 
Christianity should so control and direct it as to 
promote the one and restrain the other. The 
gospel, with its ideal of the body as a means of 
revealing the inner life, is the only power that can 
give to art purity of purpose and passion to touch 
its work with sacred fire. 

It becomes us, as Christians, to sympathise with 
art. Let us hold it a law of Christian life that our 
gospel has to do with everything which gladdens 
and refines man. A statue, a picture, a symphony, 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


N 


a poem, are among the most intellectual pleasures, 
and touch our finest emotions. The sense of art- 
beauty, it seems, has never been one of our national 
tastes. In his book on the Feeling for Nature 
in Scottish Poetry, Professor Veitch remarks that 
our earlier poets show no appreciation of such 
buildings as Melrose, Jedburgh, Roslin, and 
Dunblane, even when they stood in their un-> 
mutilated grace and symmetry, and says, ‘‘ Perhaps 
it was that the Scottish mind had then, as now, a 
difficulty in fusing religious and esthetic feeling.” 
What our old poets passed by in the fulness of 
beauty, Sir Walter Scott has pictured in ruin for 


the imagination of all time,— 
“The moon on the east oriel shone, 
Through slender shafts of shapely stone, 
By foliaged tracery combined ; 
Thou wouldst have thought some fairy’s hand, 
"Twixt poplars straight the osier wand, 
In many a freakish knot, had twined: 
They framed a spell, when the work was done, 
And changed the willow wreath to stone.” 


Since the time of our old bards, a Puritan 
element has widened the breach between religious 
and esthetic feeling still further, and taught us to | 
believe that the love of beauty in art and worship — 
is hostile to the life of the soul. The absence of 
esthetic taste has shown itself for generations in 


LHL GOSPEL AND ART, 313 


the prevalence of a general plainness, some would 
say ugliness, as marking our religious edifices and 
the worship offered to God there. The genius of 
Scottish piety has always been opposed to a merely 
sensuous worship, holding to the intellectual and 
spiritual elements as far more important than the 
merely formal and material. Nor is the tradition 
one to be ashamed of, or one to be hastily 
renounced, It is weak and foolish to break away 
from it, and clamour for a more elaborate ritual. 
At the same time it is not less weak and foolish 
to identify purity of worship with baldness and 
baseness of form. We must not suppose that 
spirituality means rudeness—the severance of all 
beauty and artistic feeling from the worship of 
God. A morbid dread of what is chaste and 
refined in the services of the sanctuary is no true 
sion of a church’s prosperity; there should be 
infused into them that solemn and chastened 
beauty which is congenial not only to good taste, 
but to spiritual thought and feeling. In an age 
of intellectual and artistic culture like the present, 
it is as natural to employ the aids of music and art 
in our worship as it is to write correctly or talk 
good grammar. Our churches should be in a 
general way as artistic as possible. An art-feeling 


314 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


should invest them on every side. Architectural 
symmetry, with a touch of the witchery of colour 
in painted window, all producing a sense of harmon- 
ious beauty, should hang about them like an atmo- 
sphere, and music should add its choicest treasures 
to that offering of praise which glorifieth God. 

It is necessary, again, to recognise the connection 
between industry and art. 

In some countries it appears as if nothing could 
be useful that was beautiful, and nothing beautiful 
that was useful. Not so in Greece or in Italy. 
When art was great in those lands, the artist was 
a craftsman, and the craftsman was an artist ; 
there was no distinction between them. Utility 
and beauty clasped hands, and kissed each other. 
The esthetic instinct was universal, and lay at the 
root of their life, so that whatever left their hands 
bore its stamp. This art-feeling was, in Italy 
especially, the mark of no particular class. It was 
common to all, high and low; and the desire was 
not alone for the adornment of churches and public 
places, but on the meanest articles of domestic use, 
cups and platters, door-panels and chimneypieces, 
a wealth of artistic invention was lavished by 
innumerable craftsmen, who were endowed with 
rare taste. Amongst ourselves no such apprecia- 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 315 


tion of art has ever been manifested, nor was any 
adequate sense of its vital importance felt till after 
the International Exhibition of 1851, when we 
began to discover that in some departments our 
commercial supremacy was seriously threatened by 
the artistic superiority of our continental rivals. 
This brought home to our minds the necessity 
of giving more attention to art as an object of 
economic value, and since then striking develop- 
ments have taken place in what were once the 
most art-forsaken centres of modern industry, such 
as Manchester and Glasgow. Art should not only 
be apphed to industry, but should be incorporated 
with our national and municipal life. The walls of 
our edifices, instead of being blank and silent, 
ought to be invested with forms that appeal to 
men’s deep and solemn feelings. There are whole 
streets in which a tasteless age has been gorgonised 
into stone, and the ugliest features of these are 
still reproduced in the form of the modern jerry- 
builder; but the day is coming when our public 
buildings and thoroughfares will be adorned and 
made delightful with things beautiful to see, and 
eloquent of whatever great deeds or good works 
have enriched and honoured the annals of the 
places of our birth. 


316 THE GOSPEL AND ARL 


Still further, a love of art should adorn our homes. 
Ruskin says that the pomp and grace of Italy 
cannot be ours, but we may have the loftier 
privilege of bringing the power and charm of art 
within the reach of all, especially of the humble 
and the poor. Beauty and elegance need not be 
the exclusive possessions of the rich. Skill and 
science have brought works of art within the reach 
of all. The poor may surround themselves with 
artistic objects at little expense; they can put a 
flower in the window, or a picture on the wall. 
Such things are educative. A good engraving of 
Rembrandt or Reynolds is so. We want great 
ideas brought into humble homes, and a picture, 
that costs a trifle, will represent a noble thought, 
or heroic deed, or a sweet bit of nature from the 
fields. Turner’s pictures may hang in any house. 
Cruikshanks may preach temperance, and Ary 
Scheffer purity and piety. Raphael’s Madonna 
may be had for twopence, and of it some one says, 
“Tt looks as if a bit of heaven were in the room.” 
About twelve years ago a band of art-workers 
met in Glasgow to form what has been called “The 
Kyrle Society for bringing home beauty to the 
poor,” and it seeks to decorate, by wall-paintings, 
pictures, and so forth, workmen’s clubs, mission 


THE GOSPEL AND ART. 317 


halls, and hospitals; and to give, by a voluntary 
choir, oratorios and concerts to the poor. Lately 
another scheme has been attiliated with the Kyrle 
Society, and has the hearty approval of the 
Institute of Fine Arts, the Ruskin Society, the 
Social Union, and kindred societies, whose aim is 
to foster art as a vital element in the well-being of 
the city. A set of panels has been painted for the 
hall of the Prisoners Aid Society in Duke Street, 
and the artists of Glasgow have contributed the 
entire work. Here is a field for our young people 
of taste and talent, to put forth such skill as God 
has given them, and carry a little sunshine into 
the lives of the poor. 

Finally, the highest art is the art of life. 

Milton says that the best poet is he who makes 
his own life a poem. Just so. The end of all art 
is to make life full and harmonious. A. beautiful 
form is better than a beautiful face, and a beauti- 
ful behaviour is better than a beautiful form ; it 
gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures, it 
is the finest of the fine arts. Christianity is here 
the supreme art, and Christ Himself the Supreme 
Artist. Browning sings— 


“God is the perfect poet, 
And in creation acts His own conceptions ;” 


318 THE GOSPEL AND ART. 


and an apostle writes, ‘‘We are God’s workmanship” 
—God’s poem, it is in the original—‘“‘created in” —or 
by—“ Christ Jesus unto good works.” ach life has 
its own chord, which it has to complete. Thoughts, 
words, and actions should make one perfect whole. 
As childhood passes away, the need and the beauty 
of harmonious life increase. As manhood awakes 
to life’s meaning, some harmony of purpose is felt 
to be of vital importance. We seek the grown-up 
taste of order, balance, and proportion. Each 
action becomes significant as a note which goes to 
make up the music of the whole. We learn to 
harmonise with our surroundings. A fuller growth 
takes place when we are drawn away to live with 
nature, and when intercourse with Him who hides 
behind her beauty, restores in us the harmony 
that human conflict has done so much to disturb. 
It is possible to make our lives so harmonious with 
our circumstances, so fair and perfect, that the 
beauty of the Lord our God comes upon us, and 
the art of life is complete. This is the highest 
product to which we can aspire. The artist of 
humanity! To realise its ideal, and fulfil it in a 
real likeness of character to the goodness of Jesus 
Christ, what higher art than this can we know? 
What need of the painter’s brush and canvas, 


LHL GOSPEL AND ART, 319 


if we know how to paint in true feeling, and 
breathe joyous life? What need of poet’s pen 
and paper, if our poems speak the truth of holy 
living What need of musician’s instrument 
and orchestra, if all that is within us rises to the 
power and beauty of adoring harmony? Such a 
life is infinitely more beautiful and worthy than 
the greatest works of the great masters. Let us 
learn the first and last lesson which a study of 
the fine arts teaches—“ to make everything beauti- 
ful that we do; above all, our own characters and 
lives,” 


Oliphant, Anderson, § Ferrier’s Publications. 


Extra crown 8vo, cloth, with Illustrations and Map, price 5s., 


Calabar and its Mission. By Hucu Go.Lplie. 


‘The United Presbyterian Church has reason to be proud of the men it has 
sent out to the Calabar River, and the work that has been done since the 
foundation of its Mission there, half a century ago. The Rev. Hugh Goldie 
was one of the earliest of the labourers in that field, having landed at Creek- 
haven in 1847, after spending six years in mission work in the West Indies. 
His book is therefore a narrative of the vicissitudes of fortune, and the 
changes in the native customs and conditions of European intercourse with 
this part of the Oil River Protectorate during the past fifty years, by one who 
has been himself an eye-witness of what he describes, or who had his 
information at first-hand from the other pioneers of Christianity with whom 
he has been associated. The best tribute to the success of missionary effort 
in this quarter is a comparison with the state of things that existed when 
Messrs. Waddell, Edgerley, and Goldie were first brought into contact with 
the revolting and barbarous practices of the Negro tribes on the Cross and 
Old Calabar Rivers, and the improved behaviour of king and people that have 
come under the influence of the Mission.’—Scotsman. 

‘A very valuable and ably-written history of the Mission of our Church in 
Old Calabar. . .. The history of the progress is striking, and will be read 
with unflagging interest.’— United Presbyterian Magazine. 

‘We cannot have too many such books. They furnish an ‘‘evidence of 
Christianity” which it is hard indeed to gainsay or resist.—Presbyterian 
Witness. 

‘The book has a twofold interest and value, appealing to the student of 
humanity, as well as to those who are interested in Christian missions, to 
the merchant as well as to the evangelist; for the truth is that the history of 
its Mission is the history of Calabar, which has just now taken an important 
step in requesting to be made a British Colony.’—North British Daily Mail. 

“A book of intense interest to all who have the welfare of the Christian 
missions at heart.... A clear and instructive account is given of the 
country and people of Calabar, the slave trade and its abolition, and the rise 
and progress of the Mission, the narrative abounding with personal and pictur- 
esque details, which rivet the attention of the reader.’—Kilmarnock Standard. 

‘Tells of anoble work in the foreign field, which has been carried on, so to 
speak, with little noise. The author has himself spent a lifetime of honour- 
able service there, and he narrates the rise and progress of the Mission with 
admirable fulness. —British Messenger. 

‘Mr. Goldie, besides giving the history of the rise and progress of the 
Mission, enters into the life, the manners, customs, etc., of the people, and 
gives much most valuable information to the student of mankind. It is much 
to be hoped that Mr. Goldie would give a book on the life, manners, customs, 
tales, riddles of the people, etc. No one is fitted to do such a work so well, 
as is shown by the way he has executed the work now under notice.’— 
Aberdeen Journal. 

‘While singularly unpretentious in style, is exceedingly interesting and 
full of information that will be highly appreciated by ethnological students 
as well as the general reader. There can be no question at all but that the 
influence of the Mission on this part of the West Coast of Africa has been 
wholly for good,—a fact which is not so much asserted as quietly demon- 
strated in Mr. Goldie’s narrative.’—Scottish Leader. 

‘The missionaries not merely laboured with great zeal and devotion, but 
have something to show as the reward of their work, in the improvement of 
the manner of life of the natives and in the exploration of the country.”— 
Scots Observer. 


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